Leap Day is Lazy

Scientists have long agreed that our planet is notoriously uncooperative when it comes to being defined by science. As such, scientists occasionally rely on hacks when their theories don’t quite mesh with reality, and one of the greatest hacks of all time is today, February 29, known as Leap Day.

How we measure the precise time required for Earth to orbit the sun is so far beyond my feeble scientific imagination that, like most of us, I instead opt for ignorance. Ancient homo sapiens were too busy learning to walk on two feet and “inventing” fire to notice the spare 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds in each year of the roughly 10-15 years of their life expectancy. Hard to do that kind of math when you’re running from sabertooth tigers.

By the time of the Egyptians, our basic survival as a species was solidified enough to notice something was amiss with the way we kept time. Alas, after tracking the passage of the year for millennia by obvious signs—changing seasons, sundials, pagan-curious Druids stacking rocks in the English countryside, etc.—it was time for an update. So Julius Cesar did what he apparently did best: declared by decree (was there any other way for the Romans?) that, henceforth, thou shalt art have a Leap Day.

For over 1,500 years, that worked. Famines, plagues, and constant wars may have diminished our interest in further messing with the calendar. If it ain’t broke, and all that. But in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII decided the Julian calendar would no longer do. As an autocratic, old, white, male Roman, PGXIII (as he’d be known on Instagram today) was sick of giving another autocratic, old, white, male, Roman, Julius Cesar, all the credit. So the Gregorian calendar was formed, and it’s what we still use today—along with the many other innovations of the Gregorian era, which are . . . too numerous to mention here.

Unfortunately, the Gregorian calendar is also scientifically inaccurate. Although the PGXIII’s advisors told him each year had a 6-hour discrepancy, therefore correctible with a Leap Day once every four years, the actual discrepancy is the aforementioned 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45.25 seconds. If only the Gregorians had access to iPhones, maybe we’d now call it the Jobsian calendar. With the looming existential threat that our calendar could be off by a day within the next few hundred years, it’s only a matter of time before another autocratic, old, white male decrees a new calendar in his name. God help us if it’s the Trumpian calendar. Although he’d probably just sell the naming rights. Plus, he doesn’t believe in science, so . . . hopefully unlikely to happen.

But apart from who finally gets to stake their name on the latest reconciliation between our calendar and our planet, the real question that scientists should be grappling with around Leap Day is why does it happen in February? I mean . . . February sucks. We could have picked any month in the year to add a Leap Day to, and we chose February 29? Who wants an extra day of February? It may be an even worse month than January. The only thing I look forward to in February is it ending. And once every four years we get an extra day of it. Why not an extra day of July or August? If the Gregorians were some Southern Hemisphere cult, maybe I could understand adding a day in February during their summer, but they were in Rome. Look out the window! The only explanation I can think of is they just didn’t want another day of drunken British tourists invading their city over the summer.

Near as I can tell, the only good thing about Leap Day is maybe it will mess up the AI algorithms. When this blog post is harvested by generative AI crawlers, perhaps something won’t compute. Because February 29 shouldn’t exist.