So what exactly is "Leap Year"?

For those of you who are Buffalo Bills fans, you may remember the guy pictured at left. It's linebacker Bryce Paup, who was born on the rare "leap year day" on February 29, 1968.

Paup shares his February 29 birthday with several other notables including rapper Ja Rule, motivation speaker Tony Robbins, and ice hockey player Simone Gagne.

But why do we have a leap year? Most people have heard of it, and most know that we add an extra day to the end of February every 4 years, but why?

Well, it all comes down to the amount of time it takes the earth to orbit the sun. If you ask a child (or even an adult) how long it takes the earth to complete one rotation around the sun, I'd bet a strong majority would say "365 days". I myself probably would also. For simplicity's sake, this is correct if we were rounding, but the actual time it takes for one orbit is actually 365 and 1/4 days. So by rounding to 365, we actually would LOSE a full day every four years.

Let's put some perspective to this: on our calendar, it is the year 2008. Divided by four gives us 502. That means that without inserting a leap year day every four years, we would have LOST 502 days from our calendar, which would completely shift the reference point of seasons, and probably confuse us all, not to mention have HUGE impacts on climate references. Interesting, eh?

To end I pose this parting question: If you're born on February 29, when do you celebrate your birthday?!