David K. Israel explained the leap second the other day, so in the last few hours of this leap year, let’s also look at that extra day we had way back in February.

Our average calendar year (the usual 365 days) is a little out of sync with the astronomical year – the 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds it takes the earth to go once around the sun. That little chunk of extra time doesn’t seem like much (you could probably let 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds slip by while reading this blog), but over time it adds up. Every four common calendar years, the calendar would be about a full day behind of the astronomical year. As time went on (we’re talking a few hundred years), our calendar months would start to fall earlier in the year. We’d have Christmas in the summer and Fourth of July barbecues in the dead of winter. It would be chaos.

To prevent that drift and keep the calendar and astronomical years in sync, we created the leap year and add one extra day to the calendar every four years (most of the time, we’ll get to that in a minute). Over a four year period, then, we average 365.25 days per year and just about keep pace with the astronomical year. But a solar year is just shy of 365.25 days – 365.2422 days, actually – so if we added a leap day strictly every four years, we’d eventually get ahead of the astronomical calendar and months would fall later in the year.

To prevent that other drift, we space our leap years out by the following rules:
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Every now and again, I head into the online archives of The New York Times and dig up the first time the paper covered various topics. Here are 16 first mentions worth mentioning (again), from Princess Di to Archie Bunker, U2 to YouTube. If you’ve got a topic you’d like to see here, leave me a comment. Happy New Year!

Diana Spencer

December 15, 1980

For ‘Hounding’ a Friend of Charles, Press Is Chided
The latest round of feverish speculation about Prince Charles’s marriage prospects has touched off a new debate in Britain about the press and royal privacy.

Even Buckingham Palace, which normally says not a word about such things, has felt obliged to formally protest some of the recent speculation, and the mother of Lady Diana Spencer, the 19-year-old woman being mentioned as a possible royal bride, has indignantly accused the newspapers of printing lies and hounding her daughter.

“May I ask the editors of Fleet Street,” said Lady Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, in a letter published in The Times of London this month, “whether they consider it necessary or fair to harass my daughter daily, from dawn until well after dusk? Is it fair to ask any human being, regardless of circumstances, to be treated in this way?”
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For weeks, her picture has been in the newspapers almost daily, accompanied by stories reporting such momentous news as the fact that she stalled her mini-car, a bright red Metro, in traffic and had trouble restarting it, or that she disclosed in an interview that she liked children, a trait that is presumably not unusual in a kindergarten teacher.

John McCain

July 31, 1967

Start of Tragedy: Pilot Hears a Blast As He Checks Plane
At 10:30am Saturday, Lieut. Comdr. John Sidney McCain 3d climbed aboard his A-4 Skyhawk for a mission over North Vietnam.

“I closed the canopy and started the plane and then went through the normal checks of the gauges and the settings,” the 30-year-old Navy pilot recalled today. “Suddenly I felt and heard an explosion. It was either my plane or the one to the right. Flames were everywhere.”

In the following moments aboard the aircraft carrier Forrestral, the 150-pound Annapolis graduate climbed out of the cockpit, stepped precariously onto the plane’s three-foot-long refueling pipe and then leaped onto the burning flight deck and ran.
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The son and grandson of two noted admirals, Commander McCain has a disarming disregard for formal military speech or style. He is wiry, prematurely gray and does not take himself too seriously.

Keep reading for Yoko Ono, the personal computer, Mount Rushmore, Wayne Gretzky, Dave Matthews Band and more. (more…)

The short answer is that no one really knows.

The long answer is that no one really knows, but there are plenty of interesting theories:

1. The idea that we yawn to get rid of carbon dioxide and take in more oxygen has been disproved by research, but persists as the “common wisdom” answer. According to this theory, people breathe more slowly when they’re bored or tired and less oxygen gets to the lungs. As CO2 builds up in the blood, the brain reflexively prompts a deep, oxygen-rich breath.

The problem with this theory is a 1987 study by Dr. Robert Provine, who is regarded as the world’s foremost yawn expert. Provine set up an experiment in which volunteers breathed one of four gases that contained varying ratios of CO2 to O2 for 30 minutes. Normal air contains 20.95% oxygen and 0.03% carbon dioxide, but neither of the gases in the experiment with higher concentrations of CO2 (3% and 5%) caused the research subjects to yawn more.

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If any group has a reason to be superstitious, it’s professional athletes. Since their livelihoods rely on their abilities to consistently replicate physical motions, it’s hardly surprising that they often don’t want to change anything about their routines once they find success. However, some stars take these rituals beyond their logical extremes. Jumping over the baselines when taking the field in baseball? Pretty standard. Wearing the same cup from high school on through your pro career like Mark McGwire reportedly did? Now we’re getting a little more peculiar. Here are ten of our favorite truly absurd superstitions.

1. Kevin Rhomberg, Cleveland Indians

Rhomberg played just 41 games in parts of three seasons with the Tribe from 1982-84. But in that short span, the outfielder managed to assert himself as possibly the big leagues’ most superstitious player ever. Rhomberg’s most peculiar superstition was that if someone touched him, he had to touch that person back. Although this compulsion was not as much of a liability as it might have been in basketball or football, it still led to some odd situations: if Rhomberg were tagged out while running the bases, he’d wait until the defense was clearing the field at inning’s end to chase down the player who’d touched him. Rhomberg also refused to make right turns while on the field, because baserunners are always turning left. So if a situation forced him to make a right turn, he’d go to his left and make a full circle to get moving in the correct direction.

2. Mike Bibby, Atlanta Hawks

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In the Cheating Death quiz, you’ll try to match up the famous corpse with the object that might have prevented his or her death. And while I don’t like to get preachy, please do all that you can to ensure that no one who’s had too much to drink gets behind the wheel this New Year’s Eve. Cheating death is tough to do, so don’t put anyone (including yourself) in that situation.

2009 promises great things, so let’s enjoy it together. Happy New Year!

Take the quiz: Cheating Death

American New Year traditions include the ball drop in Times Square, the Tournament of Roses Parade, fireworks, year-end lists, New Year’s resolutions, a toast and/or a kiss at midnight, Auld Lang Syne, and predictions for the year ahead. Here are some other customs you might not be as familiar with.

1. Años Viejos

In Ecuador, December 31st is time to ceremonially burn an effigy named Años Viejos, or Years Old. The dummies are made of old clothes and sticks or sawdust for stuffing, and often made to look like someone who has made a negative impact during the year, such as a politician. See pictures of many different Años Viejos here.

2. First-Footer

Scotland marks Hogmanay on December 31st, although the celebration lasts several days, with customs varying by locality. One of the customs associated with the new year is that of the first-footer, or the first person to visit your home after midnight on New Year’s Day. It is good luck if your first-footer is a tall handsome man with dark hair, preferably bringing a small gift. Remnants of this custom are found in America, too -I have a relative who gets very upset if the first person who calls her in the new year is a woman.

More traditions from all over, after the jump.

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Estimated CO2 released by Americans on New Year’s? 8 tons
Price for a bottle of Czar Nicholas II’s champagne salvaged from a sunken ship? $4,000
A Dietribes post about Champagne on New Years Eve? Priceless!

• If you want to maximize your champagne experience, stay away from peanuts or wearing lipstick whilst drinking. The fat molecules stretch and break bubble walls, making it less fizzy. Note: Dietribes is not responsible for any consequences resulting in a maximized champagne experience, especially those regarding emailing under the influence.

• Large bottles of champagne were originally hand-blown and were so dangerous to make and store that production of the Nebuchadnezzars and the 12-liter Balthazars (the largest bottles boast Biblical nomenclature) was halted about 75 years ago, since the merest imperfection in the glass on the inside of the bottle could cause it to explode while full.

• Speaking of, The American Academy of Ophthalmology reminds us to be careful when opening champagne bottles, because it is one of the leading causes of eye injuries during the holiday. Each bottle contains about 90 pounds of pressure … three times that of a car tire!

• In fact, the inventor of the windshield wiper, Bob Kearns, had his vision damaged from a champagne cork hitting his eye on his wedding night. Champagne has been known to be deadly in other ways as well.
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As midnight approaches on December 31st, more than a few of us will crack open a bottle or two of champagne to help toast in the New Year. With a few choice facts about the bubbly stuff, you can look knowledgeable rather than just tipsy when you drain your flute. Here are a few little nuggets you can share with fellow revelers.

What exactly is champagne?

Strictly speaking, champagne is a sparkling wine that comes from the Champagne region of northeastern France. If it’s a bubbly wine from another region, it’s sparkling wine, not champagne. While many people use the term “champagne” generically for any sparkling wine, the French have maintained their legal right to call their wines champagne for over a century. The Treaty of Madrid, signed in 1891 established this rule, and the Treaty of Versailles reaffirmed it.

The European Union helps protect this exclusivity now, although certain American producers can still generically use “champagne” on their labels if they were using the term before early 2006.

How is champagne made?

Sparkling wines can be made in a variety of ways, but traditional champagne comes to life by a process called the methode Champenoise. Champagne starts its life like any normal wine. The grapes are harvested, pressed, and allowed to undergo a primary fermentation. The acidic results of this process are then blended and bottled with a bit of yeast and sugar so it can undergo a secondary fermentation in the bottle. (It’s this secondary fermentation that gives champagne its bubbles.) This new yeast starts doing its work on the sugar, and then dies and becomes what’s known as lees. The bottles are then stored horizontally so the wine can “age on lees” for 15 months or more.

After this aging, winemakers turn the bottles upside down so the lees can settle to the bottom. Once the dead yeast has settled, producers open the bottles to remove the yeast, add a bit of sugar known as dosage to determine the sweetness of the champagne, and slip a cork onto the bottle.

What’s so special about the Champagne region?

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Sometimes false advertising is easy to spot. Statements like “Lose 20 pounds in 5 days” or “Make $1 million a month while sitting at home” seem to choke on their own incredulity, but sometimes marketers employ a little more finesse to bamboozle you. Here are six examples of shamelessly false advertising campaigns that weren’t just implicitly misleading—they were blatant lies.

1. Listerine as a Cure-All

Listerine was the first over-the-counter mouthwash sold in the United States in 1914 and by 1921 it was already falsely marketing its product. Declaring itself a cure-all for common cold ailments like sore throats and coughs, a dandruff preventative, an anti-shave tonic, and a safe way to protect yourself from cuts, bruises, wounds, and stings, Listerine was slapped with numerous false advertisement lawsuits. In 1975, the Federal Trade Commission ordered the company to spend $10 million in corrective advertising, seeing as their product was no more effective in treating colds than gargling warm water. Even then, the mouthwash giant didn’t really learn their lesson. In 2005, the company was slapped with another lawsuit. This time because Listerine claimed it was as “effective as floss” after rigging clinical trials.

2. Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound (Great for boozy housewives!)

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Photographers in the former Soviet Union seem to really enjoy taking pictures of abandoned buildings, and that’s a lucky thing, considering how many of them they have. Photographer Uryevich explains the situation this way: “Most abandoned buildings, plants and areas appeared in the Soviet Russia (’70-’80) because they belonged to the “state” (meaning nobody) and afterwards (’90) as a result of the economic crisis.” Let’s take a look at some of their work (absolutely the envy of wannabe urban explorers like myself), starting with this abandoned cement factory near Moscow (at right and below, photos by Uryevich). Update: for those who missed it, last year I did a post on the 50-km “Exclusion Zone” surrounding Chernobyl; very creepy stuff.

Contemplating a frightening hole in the floor. (I’m glad they wore breathing masks.) (more…)