Excerpt:
Chinese New Year is the main holiday of the year for more than one quarter of the world's population; very few people, however, know how to compute its date. For many years I kept asking people about the rules for the Chinese calendar, but I wasn't able to find anybody who could help me. Many of the people who were knowledgeable about science felt that the traditional Chinese calendar was backwards and superstitious, while people who cared about Chinese culture usually lacked the scientific knowledge to understand how the calendar worked. In the end I gave up and decided that I had to figure it out for myself.