ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 4, 1996 TAG: 9601040021
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: WHY THINGS ARE
SOURCE: By JOEL ACHENBACH
Q: Why are so many things quadrennial (Olympics, presidential campaigns, leap years, etc.)?
A: When we think of special numbers, we think of 0, 1, 3, 7, 10, 12, 60, 144, 666, and 1 kajillion. But 4? Why 4? Whyfore art our lives so full of fours?
The quadrennialism that infects our society is, as far as we can tell, a coincidence.
The Framers could easily have chosen another length for the president's term. At one point they debated the idea of having a president serve a single term of seven years, with no possible re-election.
Back then, most politicians served very short terms, says Gordon Wood, a historian at Brown University. Governors in most states served only a year, and were constantly campaigning for re-election. The Framers considered having one-year terms for representatives, but realized the trip to the capital would be so long and difficult for some officials that they'd arrive and have to turn around and go back to be re-elected.
Massachusetts and New York decided to let their governors have longer, calmer terms of three years. Three years seemed like a long time back then. The Framers went up a notch from that, since the president was more important than a governor. Moreover, four years was a novelty. Four was the untaken number, and a good number, a solid, stable length of time, in between the duration of representatives (which they eventually put down at two years) and senators (six years).
The Olympics? This gets complicated. Bernard Knox, a leading historian on Ancient Greece, says that while the Olympic games were every four years, the Pythian games at Delphi were every three years, and the Nemean games and the Isthmian games every two years. (Someone needs to bring back the Isthmian games, just so we can have fun saying ``Isthmian.'')
A certain Pausanias wrote a book in the 2nd century A.D. called ``A Description of Greece'' which explained the four-year cycle of Olympics. He said the games were established by Heracles of Crete, who had four brothers. This inspired him to hold the games every fourth year. Obviously there's something odd here, since there were five boys all together. Knox says the Greeks had a funny way of counting - they counted both the first and last years in a four-year cycle, and would call that ``five years.''
``It's really weird,'' says Knox.
The leap year goes back to 47 B.C., and is dictated simply by math. The Earth, by chance, takes about 365 and 1/4 days to make a complete orbit around the sun. Thus every fourth year you need to add a day. If the Earth took 365 and 1/3 days for its orbit, we'd need a leap year every third year.
(We remind you, once again, that because the orbit is actually about 12 minutes quicker than 365 and 1/4 days, the Gregorian Adjustment dictated that there would be no leap year in years divisible by 100, unless they were divisible by 400; hence there was not a February 29, 1900, but there will be a February 29, 2000.)
(Barring another adjustment.)
The Mailbag:
Bob C. of Summerland Key, Fla., asks, ``Why does it take longer to deep-fry potatoes than it does to boil them, since the fat is hotter than boiling water, and why do they perforate postage stamps, since surely it has nothing to do with how they tear?''
Dear Bob: Great observation! Oil can get about twice as hot as boiling water, but those fried taters take forever to cook.
The reason is that fat is ... well, too fat. The molecules, that is. The oil molecules are bigger than water molecules. Thus the water molecules, while not as hot, can more easily penetrate and break up the crystal-like starch granules, says Mary Ellen Camire, a food scientist at the University of Maine.
``You need water to really cook starch,'' she says.
As for stamps: Try folding along the perforation before tearing. (This is a dangerously practical column today; next week we need to write about something that even Stephen Hawking would find abstruse.) We can tell you that the perforating of stamps is an extremely carefully monitored practice.
For example, we are told by the U.S. Postal Service that the hole size on stamp perforations is 40/1000th of an inch. Postal service regulations allow the hole to be up to 5/1000th larger than that, but they can't be any smaller (because that would make it even harder to tear accurately). The spacing is 80/1000th inch from the center of one hole to the center of another.
Have we got facts!
Keep in mind that stamps are invariably weaker in one direction than in another. A 15-millimeter-wide vertical strip should be able to support a dangling weight of between 5.5 and 6.5 kilograms without tearing. That's the tensile strength. But if you pivot it 90 degrees, regulations only require that it can resist a weight of 3.5 to 4.5 kilograms. (A stamp, like a newspaper, is stronger in the direction that it comes off the presses, so that it can be produced in long sheets.)
If you tear a stamp, you can still use it if the little number is visible. The regulations say that, to be valid, it ``must be in substantially whole condition with the denomination evident.''
They don't define ``substantially.'' How imprecise of them!
LENGTH: Medium: 94 linesby CNB