On This Day (February 29)

[MSFixR]

Happy Leap Day

How to determine if a particular year is a leap year:
if (year modulo* 4 is 0) and ((year modulo 100 is not 0) or (year modulo 400 is 0))
then leap
else no_leap
Examples: year=2008, 2008 modulo 4 = 0, 2008 modulo 100 <> 0, 2008 modulo 400 <> 0, therefore 2008 is a leap year.
year=2000, 2000 modulo 4 = 0, 2000 modulo 100 = 0, 2000 modulo 400 = 0, therefore 2000 was not a leap year.

* modulo is the remainder after integer division, examples: 3 modulo 2 is 1, 6 modulo 3 is 0.
The conjunctions "and" and "or" in the above code are Boolean operators. "And" means that all conditions must be true for the result to be true, else it is false. "Or" means that one or more of the conditions need to be true for the result to be true. If all conditions are false, the result is false.

Simple, right?

1704 – Joint French and Native American forces destroyed Deerfield, Massachusetts during Queen Anne's War, killing over fifty colonists.
1720 – Unable to establish a joint sovereignty similar to England's William and Mary, Queen Ulrika Eleonora of Sweden (pictured) abdicated in favour of her husband, who became Frederick I.

Queen Eleonora of Sweden

1792 - Gioacchino Rossini, Italian composer born. (d. 1868) ("The Barber of Seville", "Cinderella", "The Thieving Magpie" and many other operas)

Overture to "The Thieving Magpie"

1860 - Herman Hollerith, American statistician born. (d. 1929) (Developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards in order to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data.)
1940 – At the 12th Academy Awards ceremony, Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to be awarded an Oscar, winning Best Supporting Actress for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind.
1944 – The Admiralty Islands campaign during the Pacific War of World War II began when American forces assaulted Los Negros Island, the third largest of the Admiralty Islands off the coast of the Papua New Guinea mainland.
1960 – Playboy Enterprises founder Hugh Hefner opened his first Playboy Club in Chicago, featuring the first service uniform registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.