I was going
to write some fun information about February 29th including a story
on Sadie Hawkins Day, which I thought was today. Apparently not although the premise of
role-reversal (where the woman can ask the man) is the same. I ended up in a
gopher hole reading all about the origins of Sadie Hawkins’ Day coming out of
the Lil Abner comicstrip. I used to read
that strip faithfully and I loved that particular storyline because it was
always so humorous. Isn’t it amazing how
comics can influence our culture? After
the original story appeared in November 1937 it became so popular around the
colleges and high schools in the United States that they had Sadie Hawkins’ Dances.
A person born in a Leap Year may be
called a leapling but only if you can run very fast. In some areas by law the leapling must change
his birthday to February 28th or March 1st (at least they
have a choice). In the Pirates of
Penzance the poor apprentice pirate who was a leapling discovered that he was
bound by his actual birthday for 21
years (tricky pirates)!
But enough
about leap year traditions. As I was
navigating through the web looking for leaping information I stumbled on what
is supposed to occur in 2012, and from thence, I stumbled upon FLOPS. Yes, you may well sit with your mouth open! The world of computers has always been
baffling, amusing and frustrating to me.
The books on computers are definitely sent to try a person of normal
common sense, what with their ill-written instructions and acronyms. But this one, well, I had to stop and read
more.
What is a
FLOPS, you may well ask? It is a measure
of FLoating point OPerations per Second for a super duper space computer
(notice the selectiveness of picking up initials?). I clicked on FLOPS and viola! there was a complete item on FLOPS. I diligently began reading but after the
third line “it did not compute”. But I
am practicing on bringing the acronym into normal conversation. How is this for size,
“By next leap year I plan to run the Sadie Hawkins’ Day
race so fast they will need to measure by FLOPS.”
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