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2B Midweek Edition-February 28-29, 2024 The Times, Gainesville, Georgia I gainesvilletimes.com LIFE Leap Day affects more than some might think Matt Rourke Associated Press A calendar shows the month of February, including leap day, Feb. 29, on Saturday, Feb. 24, in Glenside, Pa. BY LEANNEITALIE AP Lifestyle Writer NEW YORK — Leap year. It's a delight for the calendar and math nerds among us. So how did it all begin and why ? Have a look at some of the num bers, history and lore behind the (not quite) every four year phenom that adds a 29th day to February. By the numbers The math is mind-boggling in a layperson sort of way and down to fractions of days and minutes. There's even a leap second occa sionally, but there's no hullabaloo when that happens. The thing to know is that leap year exists, in large part, to keep the months in sync with annual events, including equinoxes and solstices, according to the Jet Pro pulsion Laboratory at the Califor nia Institute of Technology. It's a correction to counter the fact that Earth's orbit isn't pre cisely 365 days a year. The trip takes about six hours longer than that, NASA says. Contrary to what some might believe, however, not every four years is a leaper. Adding a leap day every four years would make the calendar longer by more than 44 minutes, according to the National Air & Space Museum. Later, on a calendar yet to come (we'll get to it), it was decreed that years divisible by 100 not follow the four-year leap day rule unless they are also divisible by 400, the JPL notes. In the past 500 years, there was no leap day in 1700, 1800 and 1900, but 2000 had one. In the next 500 years, if the practice is followed, there will be no leap day in 2100,2200,2300 and 2500. Still with us? The next leap years are 2028, 2032 and 2036. What would happen without a leap day? Eventually, nothing good in terms of when major events fall, when farmers plant and how sea sons align with the sun and the moon. “Without the leap years, after a few hundred years we will have summer in November,'' said Younas Khan, a physics instruc tor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “Christmas will be in summer. There will be no snow. There will be no feeling of Christmas.'' Who came up with leap year? The short answer: It evolved. Ancient civilizations used the cosmos to plan their lives, and there are calendars dating back to the Bronze Age. They were based on either the phases of the moon or the sun, as various calendars are today. Usually they were “luniso- lar,’’ using both. Now hop on over to the Roman Empire and Julius Caesar. He was dealing with major seasonal drift on calendars used in his neck of the woods. They dealt badly with drift by adding months. He was also navigating a vast array of calendars starting in a vast array of ways in the vast Roman Empire. He introduced his Julian cal endar in 46 BCE. It was purely solar and counted a year at 365.25 days, so once every four years an extra day was added. Before that, the Romans counted a year at 355 days, at least for a time. But still, under Julius, there was drift. There were too many leap years! The solar year isn't precisely 365.25 days! It's 365.242 days, said Nick Eakes, an astronomy educator at the Morehead Plan etarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Thomas Palaima, a classics pro fessor at the University of Texas at Austin, said adding periods of time to a year to reflect variations in the lunar and solar cycles was done by the ancients. The Athenian calen dar, he said, was used in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries with 12 lunar months. That didn't work for seasonal religious rites. The drift problem led to “intercalating'' an extra month periodically to realign with lunar and solar cycles, Palaima said. The Julian calendar was 0.0078 days (11 minutes and 14 seconds) longer than the tropical year, so errors in timekeeping still gradu ally accumulated, according to NASA. But stability increased, Palaima said. The Julian calendar was the model used by the Western world for hundreds of years. Enter Pope Gregory XIII, who calibrated fur ther. His Gregorian calendar took effect in the late 16th century. It remains in use today and, clearly, isn't perfect or there would be no need for leap year. But it was a big improvement, reducing drift to mere seconds. Why did he step in? Well, Eas ter. It was coming later in the year over time, and he fretted that events related to Easter like the Pentecost might bump up against pagan fes tivals. The pope wanted Easter to remain in the spring. He eliminated some extra days accumulated on the Julian calendar and tweaked the rules on leap day. It's Pope Gregory and his advis ers who came up with the really gnarly math on when there should or shouldn't be a leap year. “If the solar year was a perfect 365.25 then we wouldn't have to worry about the tricky math involved," Eakes said. What’s the deal with leap year and marriage? Bizarrely, leap day comes with lore about women popping the marriage question to men. It was mostly benign fun, but it came with a bite that reinforced gender roles. There's distant European folk lore. One story places the idea of women proposing in fifth century Ireland, with St. Bridget appealing to St. Patrick to offer women the chance to ask men to marry them, according to historian Katherine Parkin in a 2012 paper in the Jour nal of Family History. Nobody really knows where it ah began. In 1904, syndicated columnist Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, aka Dorothy Dix, summed up the tradition this way: “Of course people will say ... that a woman's leap year prerogative, like most of her liberties, is merely a glittering mockery.” The pre-Sadie Hawkins tradi tion, however serious or tongue- in-cheek, could have empowered women but merely perpetuated stereotypes. The proposals were to happen via postcard, but many such cards turned the tables and poked fun at women instead. Advertising perpetuated the leap year marriage game. A 1916 ad by the American Industrial Bank and Trust Co. read thusly: “This being Leap Year day, we suggest to every girl that she propose to her father to open a savings account in her name in our own bank.” There was no breath of indepen dence for women due to leap day. Should we pity the leaplings? Being born in a leap year on a leap day certainly is a talking point. But it can be kind of a pain from a paperwork perspective. Some governments and others requiring forms to be filled out and birthdays to be stated stepped in to declare what date was used by leaplings for such things as drivers licenses, whether Feb. 28 or March 1. Technology has made it far eas ier for leap babies to jot down their Feb. 29 milestones, though there can be glitches in terms of health systems, insurance policies and with other businesses and orga nization that don't have that date built in. There are about 5 million people worldwide who share the leap birthday out of about 8 bil lion people on the planet. Shelley Dean, 23, in Seattle, Washing ton, chooses a rosy attitude about being a leapling. Growing up, she had normal birthday parties each year, but an extra special one when leap years rolled around. Since, as an adult, she marks that non-leap period between Feb. 28 and March 1 with a low-key “whew.” This year is different. “It will be the first birthday that I'm going to celebrate with my family in eight years, which is super exciting, because the last leap day I was on the other side of the country in New York for college,” she said. “It's a very big year.” Atlanta is the only place in the US to see pandas BY JULIE WATSON Associated Press Eyewitness at trial recounts fatal shooting on set of‘Rust BY MORGAN LEE Associated Press SAN DIEGO — It will still be months before the San Diego Zoo gets new pandas, the first such bears sent to the United States by China in decades. For now, the only U.S. zoo left with any is in Atlanta. But globally there are many places to check out the cuddly black-and-white bundles of fur as they munch on bamboo, climb trees and lounge on their backs. The bear is native to China, where it is considered a national treasure. Here are some of the places where pandas can be seen, including possibly in the wild in China. Atlanta Zoo Atlanta has four pandas, including the first twins bom in the United States in more than a quarter century. Giant pandas typically care for only one cub when twins are bom in the wild, which usually leads to just one twin surviving. Ya Lun and Xi Lun and their parents, Lun Lun and Yang Yang, could be heading back to China in late 2024 unless the loan agreement is extended. Mexico City The only other place in the Americas where people can see pandas is in Mexico City at the Chapultepec Zoo. Xin Xin is the last panda in Latin America and is not on loan from China. That's because she's the only remaining bear descended from the giant pandas China gifted to foreign countries during the 1970s and 1980s. The second-generation Mexican-born panda traces her hneage to Pe Pe andYing Ying, who arrived at the zoo in 1975. Qatar One of the last countries that China sent pandas to was Qatar in 2022, ahead of the Middle Eastern country hosting the World Cup. The pair reside in an indoor enclosure in the desert nation designed to duplicate conditions in the dense forests of China's mountainous Sichuan province. Nearly 1,800 pounds of fresh bamboo is flown in each week to feed them. Jing Jing, the male, was given the Arabic name Suhail. Si Hai, the female, was given the Arabic name Thuraya. Moscow In 2019, the Moscow zoo welcomed its first pair of pandas, a male named Ru Yi and a female named Ding Ding. Chinese President Xi Jinping leased the pandas during an official visit that was to show a “sign of respect and trust.” Berlin The Berlin zoo is home to Jiao Qing and Meng Meng, who arrived in Berlin in 2017. They gave birth to twins, the first panda cubs born in Germany. Those cubs have since returned to China. China Giant pandas are limited to six mountainous areas of southwestern China in the provinces of Sichuan, Gansu, and Shanxi. A total of 34 pandas were born last year at two bases in Sichuan, including at Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, a popular tourist destination in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province. More than 1,800 are estimated to exist in the wild, where they are threatened chiefly by habitat loss. About 420 others hve in captivity in zoos and reserves, the majority within China. SANTA FE, N.M. — Testimony at trial Monday turned emotional and argumentative as an eyewitness recounted the fatal 2021 shooting of a cinematographer by actor Alec Baldwin during a movie rehearsal and described gun misfires, crew members walking out and a “ludicrous” pace of work. Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was the armorer for the upcoming Western movie “Rust,” is fighting charges of involuntary manslaughter and tampering with evidence at a trial that entered its third day of testimony Monday. A trial date was set for Baldwin in July on a single charge of involuntary manslaughter in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. He has pleaded not guilty. Defense attorneys highlighted Gutierrez-Reed's unusual disadvantage and vulnerability at the time as a part- time, 24-year-old armorer without trade-union membership on a set where few dared confront Baldwin directly about concerns about safety and related budgeting. Monday's testimony veered into the actor's handling of the revolver that killed Hutchins — including a video of Baldwin twice practicing a cross-draw maneuver for a camera on Oct. 21, 2021, shortly before the fatal shooting that day. Investigators found no video of the shooting. The video of Baldwin was accompanied by searing testimony from Ross Addiego, a front-line “Rust” crew member who helped guide the fdm's camera. Addiego said that in the moments after a shot rang out on set, he made eye contact with a wounded Hutchins and tried to calm wounded director Joel Souza. “The first person I made eye contact with was Halyna, who was clearly injured. In fact, she was starting to go flush and I think holding her right side,” said Addiego, breaking into tears. “I think I yelled out, ‘If you can't help, get... out of here, and someone call 911.'” Prosecutors guided Addiego through testimony in which he described his anger and frustration with safety procedures on set, including the sight of a storage cart for guns and ammunition that frequently appeared to be unattended and Gutierrez- Reed's work as an armorer in charge of loading guns with blank and dummy rounds. Investigators found six live rounds on the set of “Rust,” including the one that killed Hutchins. Addiego noted two gun misfires on set — confirmed as blank rounds without projectiles by workplace safety regulators — and just one safety meeting over the course about two work weeks, when daily meetings are the norm. He said prior to the fatal shooting he lodged safety complaints with union representatives and the film's top safety official, assistant director David Halls, who pleaded no contest last year to a charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon and may be called on to testify. “At times we seemed to be working at ludicrous speeds,” said Addiego, who also testified to the grand jury that indicted Baldwin in January. “We always seemed to be rushed and under the gun.” In a tense cross-examination, defense attorney Jason Bowles asked Addiego whether he was aware that Gutierrez- Reed had unsuccessfully requested more time for focus on her responsibilities as armorer instead of other prop duties, such as rolling cowboy cigarettes. “Did you ever stand up to Mr. Baldwin and say, ‘No, we're not going to move this fast?'” Bowles asked. “That's not my job,” Addiego said. Bowles continued: “With everybody else, grown men, not standing up to Mr. Baldwin, wouldn't you find that difficult for her also?” He noted that Addiego has sued Baldwin and Rust Movie Productions and questioned his motives in testifying. “Are you hoping that you can come in and testify here today and something happens to Ms. Gutierrez-Reed and it will help your lawsuit?” Bowles asked. “I'm hoping for justice, sir,” Addiego responded. “Two people where injured on a film set. That has affected not only me, that has affected the film industry.” Also on Monday, prosecutors called on a series of FBI forensic experts in firearms, fingerprinting, gunpowder and DNA-evidence tracing to testify about their examination of a revolver and ammunition seized from the “Rust” set and an ammunition supplier to the film based in Albuquerque. Prosecutors argue that Gutierrez-Reed is to blame for bringing hve ammunition on set. They say six live rounds found on the “Rust” set bear identical characteristics — and don't match hve rounds seized from the movie's supplier in Albuquerque. Defense attorneys for Gutierrez- Reed have pointed out shortcomings in the collection of evidence from the set, and say that ammunition supplier Seth Kenney wasn't properly investigated, and never submitted fingerprints. FBI firearms expert Bryce Ziegler testified about his analysis of a gun held by Baldwin in the shooting. He said the revolver and its safety features were fully functional when it arrived at an FBI laboratory for testing. Lujain Jo Associated Press Suhail, a male Panda sent by China to Qatar as a gift for the World Cup, eats bam boo in his shelter at the Panda House Garden in Al Khor, near Doha, Qatar, on Oct. 19, 2022.
