What would you do with one more summer day? Maybe swim, fish, go to a ballgame, bike, or take a walk with a friend — but something outdoors, right?
Well, on Feb. 29 we get an extra day — of winter — which most of us will spend indoors, wearing heavy clothes, and maybe refilling the car's windshield wiper fluid. Feb. 29 is Leap Day, which some try to disguise as the quadrennial celebration of winter, and for which we can thank Julius Caesar.
Since the Julian calendar bearing his name was invented more than 2,000 years ago, Leap Day has been when the laws of humanity accommodate the laws of nature. Because the earth requires 365 days — plus six hours — to circle the sun each year, we need Leap Day every four years for our human clocks to catch up with the celestial clock.
Without Leap Day, the four seasons of nature would slowly shift on the human calendar, so that in a few hundred years a Minnesota Christmas Day would find us wearing shorts and mowing the lawn.
In fact, this matter is so important that a few years ago there was a global conference in Geneva devoted to the controversial Leap Second — the smaller version of Leap Day. Responsibility for this instant event falls to an outfit called the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. Really.
Sounds exciting, but there's a much bigger issue at stake. Global summer equality.
Leap Day just isn't the same for everyone.
Folks residing below the equator, in the southern hemisphere, experience Feb. 29 as another summer day. They get to smear aloe on sunburned skin and say stuff like, "It's not the heat, it's the humidity." Here, at 45 degrees latitude north, we pin our summer plans on a groundhog.
