SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY: On Pins and Needles: Stylist Turns Ancient Hairdo Debate on Its Head

By day, Janet Stephens is a hairdresser at a Baltimore salon, trimming bobs and wispy bangs. By night she dwells in a different world. At home in her basement, with a mannequin head, she meticulously re-creates the hairstyles of ancient Rome and Greece.

Ms. Stephens is a hairdo archaeologist.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324900204578286272195339456.html

CULTURE/SOCIETY: April Fools' Day Facts: Behind the Laughs

This is from National Geographic. I found it with my NetVibes home page. I edited the article down a little bit. - OlderMusicGeek

April Fools' Day Facts: Behind the Laughs
Graeme Stemp-Morlock
for National Geographic News
March 28, 2008

"A lot of people think [April Fools' Day] is just obnoxious, and just wish it would stop," said Alex Boese, curator of the Museum of Hoaxes in San Diego, California.

"But people who love pranks really love the day and refuse to give up the tradition. They're the ones who keep it alive."

Boese notes, however, that the number of pranks in the home and at the office has decreased in recent years in the United States, and has been replaced by large institutionalized media hoaxes, he said.

(Related: "April Fools' Special: History's Hoaxes" [April 1, 2003].)

The origins of April Fools' Day are shrouded in mystery, experts say.

Boese believes instead that April Fools' Day simply grew out of age-old European spring festivals of renewal, in which pranks and camouflaging one's identity are common.

The Joke's On Us

Joseph Boskin, professor emeritus of American humor at Boston University, has offered his own interpretation of the holiday's roots—as a prank.

In 1983, Boskin told an Associated Press reporter that the idea came from Roman jesters during the time of Constantine I in the third and fourth centuries A.D.

As the story goes, jesters successfully petitioned the ruler to allow one of their elected members to be king for a day.

So, on April first, Constantine handed over the reins of the Roman Empire for one day to King Kugel, his jester. Kugel decreed that the day forever would be a day of absurdity.

Kugel, incidentally, is an Eastern European dish that one of Boskin's friends had been craving.

Though the news agency was less than thrilled about the gambit, "I thought I should have been complimented for a quacky, quirky story that was fitted to the occasion," Boskin said.

Humor and pranksters can offer society some much-needed perspective, he added.

"Good humorists are basically secular shamans—they both heckle society on one hand and heal it on the other."

Boese of the Museum of Hoaxes also points out the day is an outlet for social inequalities to be openly confronted. For example, street urchins used to play April Fools' Day tricks on London gentlemen in the 1800s.

Stranger Than Fiction

However, fictional humor is slowly giving way to factual absurdities in popular culture, experts say.

One needs to look no further than the Ig Nobel prizes awarded every year for scientific research.

This year's Ig Nobel prize for medicine went to researchers who published an article on sword swallowing and its side effects—in the eminent British Medical Journal, no less.

(Related news: "Poop Vanilla, Endless Soup Among 2007 Ig Nobels" [October 5, 2007].)

"We keep inventing fewer things simply because we keep finding it is impossible to compete with reality," said Marc Abrahams, creator of the Ig Nobel Prizes and editor of the Annals of Improbable Research.

In March, the journal describes Philip M. Parker, who has invented a book-writing machine that scours a database of information to churn out a book in 20 minutes. The device has helped him author more than 300,000 titles—85,000 of which are for sale on Amazon.com, including the "2007-2012 Outlook for Lemon-Flavored Water in Japan" and "Webster's English to Zarma Crossword Puzzles: Level 1."

"The real stuff is funnier simply because it is real," Abrahams said.

"In that sense, the things that are real and funny are a superior form of [an] April Fools' joke, because you can tell them and people will think you are making it up."

SCIENCE: Leap Year 101

I was clued into this webpage from infoplease by my work's newletter.

I know I should have done this post on February 29! What can I say. I'm a great procrastinator!

And I didn't know Leap Day was such a big deal! I don't remember it being this big of a deal before. Maybe cus it fell on a weekend this year - well, Friday, close enough. I'll have to remember to see how people react in 2020 when it falls on a Saturday. :) - OlderMusicGeek

Leap Year 101
Why and when we have leap years
by Borgna Brunner

2008 is a leap year, which means that it has 366 days instead of the usual 365 days that an ordinary year has. An extra day is added in a leap year—February 29—which is called an intercalary day or a leap day.

Why is a Leap Year Necessary?

Leap years are added to the calendar to keep it working properly. The 365 days of the annual calendar are meant to match up with the solar year. A solar year is the time it takes the Earth to complete its orbit around the Sun—about one year. But the actual time it takes for the Earth to travel around the Sun is in fact a little longer than that—about 365¼ days (365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds, to be precise). So the calendar and the solar year don't completely match—the calendar year is a touch shorter than the solar year.

It may not seem like much of a difference, but after a few years those extra quarter days in the solar year begin to add up. After four years, for example, the four extra quarter days would make the calendar fall behind the solar year by about a day. Over the course of a century, the difference between the solar year and the calendar year would become 25 days! Instead of summer beginning in June, for example, it wouldn't start until nearly a month later, in July. As every kid looking forward to summer vacation knows—calendar or no calendar—that's way too late! So every four years a leap day is added to the calendar to allow it to catch up to the solar year.

A Quick History Lesson

The Egyptians were the first to come up with the idea of adding a leap day once every four years to keep the calendar in sync with the solar year. Later, the Romans adopted this solution for their calendar, and they became the first to designate February 29 as the leap day.

But Wait! It's Not Quite that Simple!

The math seems to work out beautifully when you add an extra day to the calendar every four years to compensate for the extra quarter of a day in the solar year. As we said earlier, however, the solar year is just about 365 ¼ days long—but not exactly! The exact length of a solar year is actually 11 minutes and 14 seconds less than 365 ¼ days. That means that even if you add a leap day every four years, the calendar would still overshoot the solar year by a little bit—11 minutes and 14 seconds per year. These minutes and seconds really start to add up: after 128 years, the calendar would gain an entire extra day. So, the leap year rule, "add a leap year every four years" was a good rule, but not good enough!

Calendar Correction, Part II

To rectify the situation, the creators of our calendar (the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582) decided to omit leap years three times every four hundred years. This would shorten the calendar every so often and rid it of the annual excess of 11 minutes and 14 seconds. So in addition to the rule that a leap year occurs every four years, a new rule was added: a century year is not a leap year unless it is evenly divisible by 400. This rule manages to eliminate three leap years every few hundred years.

It's Smooth Sailing for the Next 3,300 Years

This ingenious correction worked beautifully in bringing the calendar and the solar year in harmony, pretty much eliminating those pesky extra 11 minutes and 14 seconds. Now the calendar year and the solar year are just about a half a minute off. At that rate, it takes 3,300 years for the calendar year and solar year to diverge by a day.

A link to the original infoplease webpage
The Wikipedia entry on leap years