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Most months look like a jigsaw.
February 2015 is a rectangle.
Rectangles look like this: []
February is the only month where this is possible because it's the only month that has a number of days divisible by 7, specifically 28. This means it can't happen on a leap year because February has 29 days. Then if and only if February 1 starts on a Sunday, you get a rectangle month.
I decided to see if this occurs often so I wrote some code and found out it happens more than I thought. In the past 100 years, there have been 11 Februaries that make a rectangle.
The last pretty February was in 2009, which I didn't notice. I didn't notice the one before that because it was the '90s and I was trying too hard to be Justin Timberlake and had too much blond hair dye to notice a calendar.
When is the next pretty February?
2026. Schedule your tweets.
Did anything happen in these pretty Februaries?
According to the great knowledge storage site Wikipedia, pretty Februaries in the past 100 years have had a lot of weather, a war, and a space thing.
- 1925: an earthquake in Canada
- 1931: an earthquake in New Zealand
- 1942: World War II
- 1953: a flood in Europe
- 1959: a blizzard in Newfoundland
- 1970: an avalanche at Val-d'Isère
- 1981: an earthquake in Athens
- 1987: a supernova is observed
- 1998: an earthquake in Afghanistan
- 2009: bushfires in Australia
- 2015: someone wrote a post about pretty Februaries
- 2026: ?
Are there any patterns here?
Sure. Over the last 100 years, a pretty February showed up in a 6, 11, 11, 6, 11, 11, 6 repeating pattern of years. If you take out the 11s, that's 666, which means the Illuminati is real. [citation needed]
Am I dumber for reading this?
Probably not.
Anything else?
Every pretty February rectangle has a Friday the 13th.
Friday the 13ths also happen more than I thought. In the past 100 years there have been 171 Friday the 13ths, which means there is one to two a year. The next one is in March.
What does it all mean?
I like shapes.
Correction: There's an excellent thread on Reddit that takes a look at the pattern on a much longer timeframe. I was looking just at the past 100 years. The 6, 11, 11, 6 pattern only happens for a limited time, but if you're rooting for humanity to be around for a while longer, things get weird and the pattern falls apart around 2207. Thanks to Dylan Staley for pointing this out and looking into the longer timeframe.
