February 29 – Happy Birthday, Leaplings!

nPostednon February 29, 2016

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nTherenare probably roughly one-fourth as many leaplings – people who havena February 29^th birthday – as there are people with anynother specific birthday (such as April 26 or October 10). That’snbecause leaplings are born on Leap Day – February 29 – and therenis only one Leap Day per every four or so years.

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nThenreason I say “or so” is because a few “every four years”nyears are not leap years. The rule is complicated: n

nIfn a year can be even divided by 4, it’s a leap year. n

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nUNLESSn it can also be evenly divided by 100, in which case it is not a leapn year. n

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nUNLESSn it can also be evenly divided by 400, in which case it is back ton being a leap year!

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nThenreason for all these complications is that leap days are added to thencalendar so that the calendar keeps time with the Sun. And it takesnthe Earth 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds to circlenonce around the Sun…So instead of giving us a nice clean 365 days anyear, or a still-pretty-clean 365.25 days in a year, we haven365.242189 days per year!

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nYounmay remember that the year 2000 was a leap year, but the years 1800nand 1900 were not.

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nANYWAY…

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nFour years ago Inwrote about Leap Day, and here we finally are again. This time, Inthought I would celebrate a few people born on this rarest of days…

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VancenHaynes, Jr. is an archeologistnand a geologist. He revolutionized his field, which is geoarchaeologyn– also known as archaeological geology. He helped figure out thentimeline of human migration into and through North America, and he helped maintain scientific access to important human skeletalnremains.

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nEvennthough he was born on this day way back in 1928, Haynes is still activenin the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona! (He turnsn88 today – hooray!)

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nCheckn out SciGirls archaeology!

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nSeymournPapert is a mathematician, ancomputer scientist, and an educator. He is one of the pioneers ofnA.I. (artificial intelligence), and best of all, he and a co-inventorncreated the Logo programming language.

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Logonis a programming language that helps kids learn how to program.nPapert created a small robot called the Logo Turtle. Kids could givenit a list of movements to make – including “Pen up” and “Penndown,” and they could use the turtle to draw designs.

Andnnot just simple designs, either! Using Logo is a great way to learnnabout recursion. It is recursion that makes fractals possible!

Recursion is when you repeatedly call on a routine.
In the example above, all the turtle is doing is drawing
boxes. But in between each box, the turtle just turns a little
bit so that the next box is slightly offset from the last.

And when you do that over and over and over again, the
result is surprisingly pretty!

The example below is a different routine that is called on
over and over – with a different, even more complex, result.

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nLikenHaynes, Papert was born on this date in 1928. He was born in SouthnAfrica, n

ngotnhis PhD in England, and has lived in the U.S. since 1963.

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nTryn programming with Logo at Turtle Academy.

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TimnPowers is a science fictionnwriter (like me! – but way more successful!). He was born innBuffalo, NY (near where my husband was born!) and now lives in SannBernardino County, Southern California (like my husband and me!), andnhe sometimes teaches in the Orange County High School of the Arts andnChapman University (my daughter’s alma mater!).

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nPowersnand a few of his pals started the steampunk literary movement (whichnhas spilled out into fashion and design and style). Steampunk is ankind of alternative history fiction in which steam power remains thenmost important form of energy. Steampunk is generally inspired bynVictorian times.