It’s Leap Year Day! Google has a nice animated Doodle featuring bunnehs:
So what happened in history on February 29? Well, the Oscars were held in 1940, and Hattie McDaniel, who played “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind, became the first African American to win an Oscar: for Best Supporting Actress. (I note that the Oscars were last night, and Spotlight won the Best Picture Award. You saw it here [and here] first!) Also in 1940, as Wikipedia reports, “In a ceremony held in Berkeley, California, because of the war, physicist Ernest Lawrence receives the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics from Sweden’s Consul General in San Francisco.” It’s a special day for Canadians, as, in 1980, “Gordie Howe of the then Hartford Whalers makes NHL history as he scores his 800th goal.”
What about births? Wikipedia reports (I’ll consider this reliable until Greg writes his long-delayed article on the problems with Wikipedia) that in many places a “leapling” (the name of someone born on February 29) is considered for legal purposes to have been born on March 1. (Otherwise you couldn’t drink till you were 80!). And quite a few notables were leaplings, including Dinah Shore (1916), Howard Nemerov (1920), Hermione Lee (1948), and Ja Rule (1976). Those who died on this day included Ludwig I of Bavaria (is there a Canadian province of Beaveria?) in 1868, La Lupe (1992) and Davy Jones of the Monkees (2012). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is showing evolution-based contrition:
A: Hili, there is a mouse on the verandah, killed by you!
Hili: I couldn’t eat it. I was looking at it and thinking about the three and a half billion years of the unbroken chain of life…
(Photo: Sarah Lawson)
Ja: Hili, na werandzie znowu jest zabita przez ciebie mysz!
Hili: Nie mogłam jej zjeść, patrzyłam na nią i myślałam o trzech i pół miliardach lat nieprzerwanego łańcucha życia…
As lagniappe, here’s an affectionate serval (Leptailurus serval) from Facebook (click on screenshot to go there):
Rossini’s birthday as well !1792). Apparently when he calculated his age in 1864 he said he was leaving behind the frivolities of youth, having reached the age of 18, but he forgot that 1800 was NOT a leap year so he was only 17!
Google’s Rossini tribute from the last leap year
http://www.google.com/doodles/gioachino-rossinis-220th-birthday-leap-year-2012
Another birthday–Frederic from “The Pirates of Penzance” turns 39.
I was going to say that!
It caused poor Frederic so many problems too. Apprenticed as a pirate until he was 21, only to find that although he thought he was 21 he was actually only 5….
Any decent system of keeping track of age shouldn’t require a fictional birthday.
The first interesting program I wrote (on a TRS-80) was a calendar program. I finished it the first week of October, 1982. I remember the date, because I suddenly realized it was nearing the 400th anniversary of the Gregorian calendar. And that calendar repeats every 400 years.
I was so excited I called NPR to ask if they were doing a story on the anniversary. They were not, but after my call, Ira Flatow did a story. The anniversary wasn’t mentioned in the New York Times.
Before the internet it was pretty hard to find any information on how calendars work.
The problem isn’t one of keeping track of age – it’s of doing it in years, not days, seconds, or almost any other unit.
Which justifies the March 1st approach. For 3 years in 4 the time that is n*365.24(22) days after your birth would fall on March 1st, and on the 4th year it would fall on the 29th.
I was trying to calculate the energy needed to either change the length of the day to be an integer fraction of the year, or to change the year to be an integer number of days long. Both solutions would require substantial energy, the delivery of which would have consequences. Minor ones. We didn’t really need an atmosphere did we?
Of course, you’d have to get rid of the Moon first, unless you wanted to have to do the whole palaver every few hundred thousand years.
Getting rid of Jupiter might be a good idea too. Venus too.
Wouldn’t a leapling at worst advance 4 years on each birthday? You could then drink when you became 24 on your sixth birthday.
Lovely photo of Hili! 🙂
Indeed! Sarah is quite the photographer!