Happy Day Plus

For some reason, I haven't felt much inspiration for blogging lately. Perhaps it's because I've been spending all my alloted "blog-minutes" on reading other, more interesting blogs. Then, by the time I've caught up with everything in my Google-reader and feel like I have all kinds of comments, the guilt and panic for having just spent X minutes/hours on anything but homework starts to set in. Promptly, I shove my face in my fluid mechanics, or begin googling the numerical approximation we apparently learned about in last lecture, but now that I am supposed to implement it, I realize I actually have no clue what to do.

Nevertheless, I thought that today, being such an important day, one that we experience only once every four years (except at the turn of the century, unless it's the turn of a milennium), I should point out that I am still alive enough to recognize its significance and relish in my 7th leap day ever. That's a pretty significant achievement, if I do say so myself.

Something really interesting to think about **WARNING: this paragraph may involve some math** is how many times I will re-experience a leap day on the same day of the week as a previous leap day. So far, it hasn't happened yet. The leap days of my life (and yes, I figured it out the old-fashioned way: looking it up in Google calendar) have been on (in chronological order, starting in 1984) W, M, Sat, Th, T, Sun, and now Friday. It's interesting that it does actually hit every single day, which makes sense if you notice that it skips 5 days every time (Monday is the 5th day after Wednesday, etc) and there are 7 days in a week. (Note: it skips to the 5th day because there are 365x4=1460 days in between leap days, and you might just happen to notice that 1460 = 4 mod 7.) For all you group theory people out there, you know that a cyclical group can be generated by powers of groups relatively prime to it. So we see, since 5 and 7 are prime, they are obviously relatively prime as well, thus skipping 5 days will eventually hit all 7 days. (This turns out to be a great example of it)

Pretty dang awesome.

I do have one question, though. Why is it called "leap day"? To me, that makes it sound like we're skipping a day, but really we get an extra one. I think we should call it "bonus day", or "extended year", or in honor of Jay's vernacular: "day plus".

And now for a random leaping dude, in honor of this leap day:


Hope you get to make the most of your extra day :)