Leap Year Doesn't Work

[gekko]

Wow, I was bored in math today. So you get my little findings.

The leap year is supposed to add an extra day every 4 years because there's actually 365.25 days in a year. There's still only 24 hours in a day, so we don't get screwed up with the .25. We just don't quite make it all the way around the sun.

Problem is a year isn't exactly 365.25 days. To be exact, it's actually 11687750361/32000000 days per year. That comes out to be approx. 365.242198781 days per year. So take the difference and you figure out that an actual year is .00780121875 days shorter than we believe. While that seems to be a small number, it does come out to roughly 11m 14.023s per year. So every leap year, where the extra day is supposed to get us back on track, we actually come short of making the full rotation around the sun.

So think about this, every year we lose 11 minutes. So every leap year, we end up about 45 minutes behind. Let's round up and say we lose an hour ever 4 years. So then every 96 years, we actually lose a day. So if you think about it, in roughly 16,800 years from now, December will be Summer, and July will be winter.

Just thought I'd point that out.