A Mathematical Explanation Why Valentine's Day Might Not Suck

We have yet to ring in the new year, but in anticipation of other disappointing holidays to come (seriously, isn't New Years set up to be anticlimactic?), let's consider Valentine's Day. Like New Years, it's meant to be a special occasion. Valentine's Day has the added pressure to create a particularly romantic day with your partner, a sure sign that reality may not meet expectations. Or maybe you shun the cliché chocolate and roses, but then the pressure of anti-Valentine's Day can be just as great! You have to wear sweatpants so hard while you care so little because it's all just a commercial holiday anyway, right?

Today in lab, my coworkers and I discovered what might be a seasonal proof to warm your icy, disappointed heart this February 14th. Just coming off the winter solstice, we were reflecting on how day length does not grow or shrink evenly throughout the year. Rather, following a sine curve, the day length barely budges around the solstices in June and December, while it rockets upward in spring or down in fall, at the equinoxes.

Just take a look at the sweet graph I drew to explain this. The horizontal axis corresponds to the day of the year, or time. The slope of the sine curve reflects the rate at which day length changes. A steeper portion of the line corresponds to times when daylight shrinks or expands at a faster clip from day to day. The fastest rate of change occurs at the autumnal equinox (AE) and the vernal equinox (VE). The peak and trough, at the summer solstice (SS) and winter solstice (WS) are flatter, meaning the day length doesn't change as quickly. Having just experienced the winter solstice a week ago, we are, sadly, at the bottom of the graph.

Given the continuous nature of the increases in daylight, when will we subjectively experience a slow thawing from winter darkness? By the vernal equinox, the days will be as long as nights and we will clearly have sensed the earlier sunrises and later sunsets. That is three months from now though, or about 90 days. Maybe halfway to the vernal equinox, 45 days from now, we will remark to our coworkers and spouse "Hey! It's staying lighter out now, isn't it?"

45 days from today is February 15th. A little rounding in either direction and I will make the bold prediction that come Valentine's Day, February 14th, you may be alone, your partner may have disappointed you, boxed chocolate may still taste terrible and roses may still have their thorns, but you'll probably wake up that day and think, "Well, at least it's not as dark as it has been." Comforting, right? An extra hour and a half of daylight can make up for so many of life's disappointments.


(The graph on the bottom is what we would expect day length changes to look like if it was a constant increase or decrease every day of the year, simply reversing at the solstices. The brackets on the main graph show how roughly equal periods of time (distance in the horizontal direction) leads to small changes in day length near the solstices, but big swings near the equinoxes.)

Healing Through Art

Three weeks ago, a Grand Jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown. Witness accounts differ in the level of aggression Brown displayed toward Wilson, but he was unarmed and did not earn a death sentence by his actions.

As anticipated—and arguably egged on by a frenzied media presence and worsened by prosecutor Robert McCulloch’s timing and tone—planned demonstrations and protests quickly turned into rioting and arson along Ferguson’s roads. Cars burned alongside the infamous split-screen image of President Obama calling for calm.

Following the shooting of Vonderitt Myers in the Shaw neighborhood, a smaller epicenter of demonstrations in the previous months has been south city, where I live. Marching up and down Grand, the major thoroughfare, protests were peaceful before I went to bed Monday night. However, I woke up to news of busted windows up and down the South Grand district of shops and restaurants a block from my house. Broken glass is not comparable to unequally applied justice or racial inequities or ongoing mistrust between police and the communities they serve. But it does represent fractured communities, scare people away from our neighborhood, and distract from efforts to make progress on issues brought up by Brown’s death.

So I was lifted up as the neighborhood associations in south city put out a call for materials and volunteers to decorate the plywood that covered broken windows and protected whole ones from further damage. Hundreds of artists and neighbors came to paint the plywood boards, turning a symbol of broken communities into uplifting messages of healing and community. Rather than exist for a week or more as a boarded up ghost town, South Grand was transformed into an impromptu art walk.

I walked around to snap pictures and thank the people who were painting. I was waiting to join a community meeting at the new pocket park on Grand where local leaders and aldermen would speak and neighbors would chalk messages of love for St. Louis. Here are the pictures I took.

The boards are starting to come down. It is peaceful at night in my neighborhood now. But that should not be permission to look away and ignore what Brown’s death has brought to the forefront. I do not believe that we need to break our communities to have them heal stronger, like a bone. But I do know that to let these problems fester unaddressed will lead to further heartache and greater problems in the future. So let us move forward and heal not just the symptoms but the underlying rot so we can have stronger and healthier communities.

See the rest of the pictures after the break.