| APRIL 8, 2016 -- Meetings and Events in April:
April 14: “Guest speaker from the Henry Whitfield Museum: Guilford Stone House”. The Stone House in Guilford is New England’s oldest house which was built in 1639. Jim is in charge of the program.
April 28: “Baking” Program: Dan. Inspection Night.
Looking Back:
Feb 11: Meeting was canceled.
Feb 25: “Leap Year Night” A leap is a year which an extra day is added on to the end of February (which everyone knows). The reason it’s added on is because the number of days in a year is not a whole day but a fractional one or 365.242190 days to be precise. If you notice the fractional part is almost one quarter of a day but it’s just shy of one. So it goes there are special rules when applying the correction: adding a day to a leap year to be sure the correction does not get overly applied. So in order to be a leap year the year must be divisible by 100 but not by 400. This scheme also causes the vernal equinox to keep gradually shifting its date between March 19 and March 21 being shifted once every leap year and then abruptly shifted in non-leap centuries. So the year 2000 was a leap year but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. This year 2016 was a leap year the next leap years will be 2020 2024, 2028, 2032, 2040, 2044 and 2048. One hears about leap seconds but this not related to a leap year. A leap second is applied in order to make up for the extra time the earth takes as it spins on its axis because it’s gradually slowing down. Adding this second of time keeps our time clocks in sync with the earth’s spin. Some other interesting things regarding leap year: the chance to be born on a leap year is 1 in 1461. There are approximately 4.1 million people in the word who were born on February 29th. |
