Opinion: Leap Day reading: A world off its rocker

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Bored after the War On Christmas ceasefire, I tried in late 2007 to get another civil war going, this one over New Year. To wit: Who are you to wish me well on holidays drawn from your ‘rational’ sun-worshipping eurocentric calendar? My lunar calendar, where holidays show up during high midsummer in some years and the dead of winter in others, where we never know which month is crop-planting month, is no worse than yours, merely different!

I got nowhere with that prank. One bored colleague replied, ‘Eh, our calendar’s no better. They can’t even do it without adding an extra day every four years.’

Too true! To all people who still wonder why the cycles of the day, the lunar month and the year can’t be better matched, and to everybody else, I highly recommend Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. ‘Being able to understand how it looks from the creator’s point of view is just great,’ writes Amazon reviewer A Customer. ‘My lesson learned: work your tail off and when you win, it always looks easier than it was...’

But don’t take Customer’s word for it, take mine. Whether you’re a history buff or just curious about why people still comprehend so much of the world through meaningless human-scale patterns, Kuhn’s book is full of valuable insights and disambiguations.