Pursuant to my writing a 45-page blog page on the Calendar Reform I have written another article which provides an analysis of the Henry-Henke Permanent Calendar (HHPC), which is a follow-up to my previous work, and this one which follows from that and sprung out from reading and research the HHPC article.
What came to mind during that process was Leap Weeks (or Leap Months) vs Leap Days. I reaaally do NOT like Leap weeks. Here I will provide a basic comparison of Leap Weeks to Leap Days so you can get an idea as to why Leap Weeks are significantly problematic and NOT ideal to use when the tool of Leap Days are available.
First we should probably cover what a Leap Day and Leap Week are:
Leap Day: A Leap Day is a day that is added to a calendar year in order to compensate for the quarter day that our calendar year does not cover due the Earth’s solar year being 365.2422 days long. Here is the a link to the section of my really long post explaining what a leap day is in detail.
In our standard world-wide calendar a Leap day is added to the calendar every 4 years on February 29th to make sure those 0.2442 days are compensated for.
Leap Week:Â A Leap Week takes a Leap Day a step further and usually compensates for not only the quarter day we lose every 4 years, but also some other missed days, such as in case a specific calendar type only accounts for 364 of our 365 days per year like this one. A whole week – 7 days – is added to the calendar every so many years to account for missing days so that the calendar would once again be in sync with the solar year.
Here is a comparison of Leap Week and Leap Day so you can understand why I prefer the Leap Day as a tool for calendar correction instead of the Leap Week:
| Issue | Leap Week | Leap Day |
|---|---|---|
| increased solar drift | Each year the calendar year drifts behind by 1.25 days which results in the calendar’s increasing drift away from the Earth’s solar cycle making dating events such as solstices, equinoxes, and lunar phases less accurate, as well as having the calendar shifting slowly away from the seasons too: Christmas (Dec 25) is effectively on the solar Dec 18 by the time the Leap week is added to the calendar. This drift is is corrected every 5 or 6 years by adding an additional week (7 days) to the calendar to bring the calendar back in sync with the solar year. | each year the year drifts by 1/4 day which is corrected by adding 1 day every 4 years |
| impaired dating | When it comes to dating events, the dates of those events which fall within the Leap Week which happens only 5-6 years become difficult to date and are not really usable. How about a birthday that falls on a leap week? You thought a single Leap Day every 4 years was annoying… here we have a full week to figure out how to date and how to use it effectively. | 1 day is easy enough – Feb 29 |
| impairs yearly analysis | Leap Weeks make it much more difficult to do yearly analysis when you have to account for an additional week added in every few years. This may be further complicated by its drift from the solar year. How will the Leap Week affect productivity, factory up-time, paychecks? and so on! Much more difficult to account for and to deal with. | Leap day will be just one extra day to account for every 4 years which is simple enough to add and it very lightly changes schedules and analysis perhaps only by a margin of error. |
