I morgen leste jeg denne artikkel på BBCens nettside.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7269816.stm

Lesere var innbudt å legge opp tankene sine, og jeg skrev noe, men i kveld har det ikke vært forlagt. Ennå. Så når jeg sa den samme artikkelen postet på wotmania, svarte jeg igjen, denne gangen med litt mer enn før. Her er det jeg skrev. Jeg gidder ikke å oversette den til norsk ;).



What about the ¼ day we don't work in the other three years? A year is (almost) 365¼ days long, so in 2005, 2006 and 2007, we all got ¼ of a day off. So this year we are making up for those ¾. It all works out fair in the end.

Of course, those of us who were alive and working in 2000 have had to work an extra day compared to those who were alive and working in 1900, 1800 and 1700, and those who will be in 2100, 2200 and 2300. Our working lives are generally long enough to allow the time lost on the four-yearly extra day to even out, but nobody lives long enough to get back the time from the other extra day once every 400 years! Maybe we should sue our employers for century-ism, and make sure our descendents get a fair deal in 2400.

(British people in 1600 were OK, because we didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752. Although perhaps the governments of France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands should work out compensation for the descendents of all those poor people who were forced to work an extra day in 1600.)

Or perhaps we can just be grateful for 1992 and 2004, when February the 29th fell on a Saturday and a Sunday respectively, and look forward to 2020 and 2032, when the same will happen again. This article seems to conveniently forget about the years when the extra day falls on a weekend.

Finally, the bright side of this is that I get an extra day's residence in my flat without having to pay more rent than I would in a 28-day-long February. So it works both ways.



Det er gøy å være en geek ;).

Nordmenn i 1600 hadde det like godt som briter, for Danmark og Norge adopterte den gregorianske kalenderen i 1700 (på 1 mars, så i virkeligheten i 1704) . Svensker, som alltid, gjorde noe ulikt fra alle andre, og sluttet på å trenge en 30 feb i 1712 for å rette forviklingen. Dere kan lese om det her: http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregoriansk_kalender

Artikkelen om skotsk uavhengihet skal komme når den kommer ;).

-- Tim.