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The Stop
Every four years (well, usually, but we’ll get to that) an extra day is added to the month of February, making that year a Leap Year. Named because of the effect it has on one’s birthday - a Thursday birthday last year means this year it should be on Friday, but the extra day means your birthday ‘leaps’ over a day and is now on Saturday - the purpose of the day is to keep our calendars accurate as we orbit the Sun. But, as humans are involved and anything out of the ordinary seems to demand a ritual or tradition of some sort, there’s more to this day than mere mathematics.1
One calendar year typically contains 365 days. Known as ‘common years’, this number is defined by the number of days it takes the Earth to complete one orbit around the Sun. However, this is not completely accurate: it actually takes the Earth 365.242190 days to orbit the Sun - or 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes and 56 seconds. Known as a ‘sidereal’ year, this year is slightly longer than the one on our calendars - an extra 5 hours 48 minutes and 56 seconds longer. It is important that this time is accounted for - if it isn’t the seasons will slowly start to drift, and after about 700 years summers in the northern hemisphere would begin in December rather than June.
The addition of an extra day every four years allows our calendars to remain adjusted to the sidereal year, but this still doesn’t solve the problem completely. Over four years, the difference between the calendar and sidereal years is not exactly 24 hours, but rather 23.262222 hours. Adding a leap day every four years actually lengthens the calendar by more than 44 minutes which, in time, would also cause the seasonal ‘drift’. Consequently, not every four years is a leap year: if the year is divisible by 100 and not divisible by 400, leap year is skipped, which means, for example, 2000 was a leap year, but 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not. The next year which will be skipped is 2100.
The inclusion of a leap day has occurred since it was first decreed in 46 BCE by Julius Caesar as a way of altering his Julian calendar to fit the solar calendar, and even after this calendar became the Gregorian calendar in 1582, the inclusion continued. The combination of a long history and its close association with the mysteries of time means many superstitions and traditions have evolved alongside it. Several involve relationships: in England women can invert tradition and propose to men on this day, in Ireland turning down such a proposal would cost the man compensation in the form of gloves, a silk gown, a fur coat or even having to perform a juggling trick on Easter Sunday, and in Scotland - according to a law decreed in 1288 by Queen Margaret - a woman had to wear a red petticoat when making her proposal.
Other traditions are light - in Germany’s Rhineland-Palatinate state, a tradition in which men decorate a birch tree with paper ribbons which they place ‘out front of the house of their girlfriend, wife, or someone they have a crush on’ is reversed on leap day, with women doing this instead. Other traditions are darker - in Taiwan, leap years are considered bad luck for the elderly, so on leap day married daughters return home to cook pig trotters for their parents, a dish believed to bring good fortune and long life. And, of course, others are just bizarre: in France 29th February sees the publication of La Bougie du Sapeur. Translated as Sapper's Candle, and named after a leapling2 character from a comic strip, the paper is only published on this day - and since starting in 1980 its popularity is such that it ‘usually outsells the other national papers’.
The Detour
Today’s Detour is to a Singaporean team’s entry in the final of 2023’s World Lion Dance Championships. A spectacular video (9:25), the two-handed costume dancing is usually performed during Chinese New Year celebrations. Worth watching for the mix of control and acrobatics. Remarkable.
World Lion Dance Championships 2023
The Recommendation
Today’s Recommendation is Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop (2007). An attempt to explore what is meant by saying ‘I’, the book is Hofstadter’s expansion of various theories of human consciousness he began in his classic - and almost impenetrable - Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979).
From the back: Deep down, your brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles. On a higher level it is a jungle of neutrons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call ‘symbols’. The most central and complex symbol is the one you call ‘I’. An ‘I’ is a strange loop where the brain’s symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down so that symbols seem to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.
To each human being, this ‘I’ is the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real? Is our ‘I’ merely a convenient fiction? Does an ‘I’ exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?
These are among the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter’s first book-length journey into philosophy since his Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach. It is a tale crisply told, rife with anecdotes, analogies and metaphors - cutting-edge philosophy that any strange loop can understand.
The Sounds
Today’s playlist is a selection of five tracks, all of which - as today is leap day - are connected to jumping: ‘Jump’ (Van Halen, 1984), ‘Jump Around’ (House of Pain, 1992), ‘Jump’ (Kris Kross, 1992), ‘Jump (For My Love)’ (The Pointer Sisters, 1984) and ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ (The Rolling Stones, 1968). Enjoy!
The Thought
Today’s Thought is from Douglas Hofstadter:
‘I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.’
If you have a thought on this Thought - or any part of today’s issue - please leave a comment below:
And that’s the end of this Stop - I hope you enjoyed the diversion!
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Until the next Stop …
Sources for today’s Stop include: The Science of Leap Year (Smithsonian), Leap Year Superstitions and Traditions (Independent) and Leap Year Traditions (Country Living).
A leapling is a person born on leap day.
I see a thread in your music selections.
i had no idea that we skipped leap year every hundred years except the ones divisible by 400. I feel cheated because Ill never get to experience that! Excellent post, as always!