Another orbit? Why, you don't look a rotation older than 4.56 billion years!

In what is becoming an annual January tradition celebrating my laziness, I'm reposting this article about why astronomers are no fun at New Year's parties. Well, they can be, but only until you actually say "Happy New Year!" to them, whereupon they'll corner and lecture you about how to measure orbital periods. It's amazing any astronomers reproduce. Anyway, here's the article, which was a lot of fun to originally write, and even more fun to cut and paste here.]