Almost every four years it’s a leap year. Leap years have one extra day due to an astronomical fact about the earth’s revolution around the sun. It takes roughly 365 and one quarter days to go around the sun, however the standard calendar year lasts only 365 days. Were we to ignore the extra quarter of a day, strange things would eventually happen to our seasons - like winter and snow in July. To counteract the accumulation of additional quarters of a day, theGregorian calendar adds an extra day of February 29 nearly every four years.

Until Julius Caesar came to power, people observed a 355-day calendar - with an extra 22-day month every two years. But it was a convoluted solution to the problem and feast days began sliding into different seasons. So Caesar ordered his astronomer to simplify things. Astronomer opted for the 365-day year with an extra day every four years to scoop up the extra hours. This is how the 29 February was born.

Why is February 29, not February 31, a leap day? All the other months have 30 or 31 days, but February suffered from the ego of Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus. Under Julius Caesar, February had 30 days, but when Caesar Augustus was emperor he was peeved that his month - August - had only 29 days, whereas the month named after his predecessor Julius - July - had 31. He pinched a couple of days for August to make it the same as July. And it was poor old February that lost out.

Text source: Compilation from widely disseminated descriptions in online news sources. 

رؤى ذات صلة من Knoema

The Global Opportunity Index 2020

Are you investing in the best economies for your industry's footprint? What factors weigh most heavily on your investment decisions? Is your economy improving in areas that matter most to investors? Economists, investors, and other analysts worldwide rely on multi-economy datasets from the likes of the World Bank and IMF as well as indices to make comparisons across time and countries and address these sorts of questions. The Global Opportunity Index (GOI) developed by the Milken Institute delivers one such index to help guide investment decisions and establish baseline estimates...

Export Concentration Index: A Measure of Economic Vulnerability

The concentration index of exports estimates a country’s reliance on a limited group of commodities as its primary source of foreign exchange income. Ranging from 0 (perfect diversification) to 1 (concentrated on a single product)*, a comparison of index scores to the contribution of natural resources to GDP worldwide shows that countries that are resource-rich tend to have less diversified export bases. Last year Iraq’s export concentration index reached 0.97, driven by its export concentration in mineral fuels, namely oil. Other oil exporters—including Angola, Iran, Kuwait, and...

UK & US: Best Cities and Jobs for Job Seekers

Employees choose employers, just as employers choose employees. And, companies like Glassdoor make it easier than ever for people to move beyond annual salary and statistics on the highest paying jobs—none of which they may even be qualified for—in their evaluation of potential employers. Through regular surveys of employees, Glassdoor develops city-based job satisfaction ratings that account for work-life balance, cost of living, and competition among employees or, in other words, hiring opportunities. Glassdoor then ranks the most desirable cities for employment based on its...

Number of Starbucks Stores Globally, 1992-2021

(29 March 2021) Today Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse company in the world, with 32,938 retail locations as of the first quarter of 2021, followed distantly by coffee shop chains such as Dunkin Donuts with about 10,000 restaurants, Tim Hortons with 4,300 outlets, and Costa Coffee with nearly 1,700 stores worldwide. Starbucks was founded in 1971 in Seattle, Washington, and incorporated on November 4, 1985, to become the publicly traded Starbucks Corporation.Based on the company's positive, sustained operating results, it is ranked among Forbes' Top-500 world's biggest public...