Okay, I'm not a secret Pointer Brother, but I thought I'd drivel on inanely because of the occasion. So yeah, for those of you who either sleep under a rock or don't follow the Gregorian calender, it's February the 29th. People born on this day have a queer habit of saying "I'm <real age /4> years old!" on this particular date. If so, and you're *really* only 5 years old, what the hell are you doing, driving a car, drinking alcohol and sleeping with women? You've made those innocent girls into paedophiles. Well done, you twat.
But, it's a 1/1826 chance that you're born on this date, so I allow them their little quirks. Basically, the only reason this date exists is because the Gregorian calander is wrong. A year is NOT 365 days on the nose, it's actually 365.25 days (and growing, due to the effect of the tides counteracting the Earth's spin). Therefore, if we didn't clag an extra day onto February (why the hell it only has 28 days to begin with, I don't know. Did the calandar-making people hate the person who made the name so odd to pronounce for its spelling?), we'd be slowly lagging behind. Summer would start in December, confusing the shit out of christmas-card makers, Easter would be celebrated in Autumn, and people going to Wales in a caravan for a weekend away in June might be surprised to find 16 inches of pure, unadultered snow.
Essentially, it'd be like living in Australia. A fate worse than death*.
*(Just kidding, any Aussies who have also got lost on the internet and ended up here. I'd gladly welcome your weather. Just keep your fucking snakes and spiders to yourselves, okay?)
They actually added a leap-second this year that'll be happening on June 30th. And according to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, it's going to take six billion years for tidal flow to stop the world from turning. By then, we'll have long since been turned into ashes by a rapidly-expanding Sun. If the planet was to suddenly stop turning, depending on where you are, you'd be hurled to the east at around 900 miles per hour. Massive tidal waves would slam into the western coasts of every continent. Weather would practically stop.
ReplyDeleteLeap years don't sound so bad now. Certainly not as bad as Australia.