Showing posts with label Roman Calender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roman Calender. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Google doodles celebrate Gioachino Rossini's 220th birthday and Leap Year

Today Google is celebrating Gioachino Rossini's 220th birthday. It's a day which rarely comes into the calender, Google has doodled with two-in-one rare doodle that commemorates not only the leap year day but also it's a 220th birth of the Italian composer Gioachino Rossini.


This year is leap year and today is leap day and both are associated with frogs, the leaping amphibians, so today Goolge doodle has a number of frog on it's logo, all four of them.

Google doodles celebrate Gioachino Rossini's 220th birthday and Leap Year

Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born into a family of musicians in Pesaro, a town on the Adriatic coast of Italy which was then part of the Papal States. His father, Giuseppe, was a horn player and inspector of slaughterhouses. His mother, Anna, was a singer and a baker's daughter. Rossini's parents began his musical training early, and by the age of six he was playing the triangle in his father's musical group.
Gioachino Antonio Rossini

Gioachino Antonio Rossini's was the famous 1816 comic opera The Barber of Seville,  one of the most performed operas. Of the four frogs in the scene, one is at the piano and the soprano is the only one leaping. The barber frog is Figaro and the frog getting a shave is Count Almaviva (Characters created by French playright Pierre Beaumarchais and The Barber of Seville is one of the three Figaro plays penned by him).


Google doodle of Gioachino Rossini leap year is the third leap year doodle in Google's history. Before that the previous two were put up in 2004 and 2008. And before that there was no Google doodle in the year 2000.
If I am not wrong this is the 1314th Google doodle since the first ever on for the Burning Man Festival back on August 30, 1998.
A leap year is the year which contain one additional day, its because of keeping the calender year synchronized with the astronomical or seasonal year. Because seasons and astronomical events do not repeat in a whole number of days, a calendar that had the same number of days in each year would, over time, drift with respect to the event it was supposed to track.
Code to determine Leap Year

Algorithm

Pseudocode to determine whether a year is a leap year or not in either the Gregorian calendar since 1582 or in the proleptic Gregorian calendar before 1582:
if year modulo 4 is 0
   then
       if year modulo 100 is 0
           then
               if year modulo 400 is 0
                   then
                       is_leap_year
               else
                   not_leap_year
       else is_leap_year
else not_leap_year
or as a boolean expression
is_leap_year = ( year modulo 4 is 0 ) and ( ( year modulo 100 is not 0 ) or ( year modulo 400 is 0 ) )