QUOTE(Golden-Fist @ Apr 1 2006, 06:46 PM)
A leap year is due to everyone not caring that days are actually 23 hours and some other minutes and seconds long. It's so our way of keeping time is kept in balance (So winter doesn't appear during "July") So you'd celebrate your birthday 365 days later, no matter what the calender says it's still been 365 days.
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No, that's a common mistake. The leap day is due to the number of days in a year, not hours in a day. The later is why a leap second is introduced.
(Even though it adds up to a day extra every year we don't need. Find the actually length of days and do the math, we've added a day to every year for millenia. It's the year 2000 by truer standards.)