[gmrankin]

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since leap year is actually just humans way of admitting, "Hey look... we screwed up. We miscalculated how long a second should be so that 31536000 of them equal the amount of time it takes for the Earth to do a full revolution around the sun,"

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It wasn't a miscalculation. It stemmed from the belief that astronomical events are regular. Historically the second was defined as follows. One day is divided into 24 units called hours. One hour is divided into 60 units called minutes. One minute is divided into 60 units called seconds. The 24 comes from the Egyptians and the use of 60 comes from the Babylonians which used a base-60 system (technically it's mixed-radix base 6 and base 10). The problem is that the Earth's rotation around its own axis is not uniform so defining seconds in terms of said rotation is bad. That's why time is now defined using a more regular natural event (the amount of time it takes for a certain number of periods of transitions between two hyperfine energy states in a certain cesium isotope under certain conditions.)

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not sure where you got your day theory...

here is why the day is 24 hours... that is the solar day. its what we set our watch to, 24 hours. but the sidearal day is more accurate. but it would f*** us all up if we used it. same concept for the year.

The length of time which passes between a given "fixed" star in the sky crossing a given projected meridian (line of longitude). The sidereal day is 23 h 56 m 4.1 s, slightly shorter than the solar day because the Earth 's orbital motion about the Sun means the Earth has to rotate slightly more than one turn with respect to the "fixed" stars in order to reach the same Earth-Sun orientation.