dates

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Fictional birthdays, date misassignments, and the calendars of Caesar and the Pope

Hi, everybody.  It’s Wednesday, July 22nd, which means there are only two months left for you to buy something for Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday.  Though, actually, they’re pretty well-to-do hobbits, so it seems unlikely that you’ll be able to get them something they want that they don’t already have.

Oh, and also, hobbits give other people presents on their own birthdays, not the other way around.  This always struck me as odd, but kind of cool.  It’s almost like saying, “Here’s a little gift for you in celebration of my birth, just to remind you what a gift it is that I was born and that you know me.”

Well, at least that’s one way of looking at it.  Anyway, I don’t think you’re likely to receive a gift from Bilbo and/or Frodo, even on their birthday, apart from being able to read and/or watch The Hobbit and/or The Lord of the Rings.  That’s a lucky break for us all, when you think about it, and you don’t need to wait for September 22nd to partake of it.

I know, I know, why would one celebrate the birthday of a fictional character, anyway?  Well, it’s not as though mainstream culture doesn’t do it already, in oodles of major religious holidays.

Even if you’re convinced that Jesus really existed, biblical scholars agree (so I’m told) that he was not born on December 25th, but sometime in the summer, probably.  The later Church, never shy about playing free and loose with facts of reality (as religions tend to do), reset the date in order to appropriate the typical winter solstice-related festivals heavily celebrated by many cultures.  Such celebrations included Saturnalia (Roman culture‒you can tell because it’s got Saturn in it) and Yule (Norse, with the evergreens and mistletoe and holly and such like).  There were probably others.

The earlier Church cared more about Easter anyway, which makes a bit of internal sense.  That’s the purported miraculous day, when Jesus regenerated and flew to the heavens in his TARDIS.  Or whatever happened, if anything.

Of course, if we all wanted to avoid mislabeling Jeshua’s birthday, we could just celebrate Newtonmas on the previously celebrated day, since Isaac Newton was born on December 25th.  And he definitely did things that, while not literally miraculous, boggle the mind of nearly every mortal with knowledge enough to understand those contributions.

Mind you, he was, by all accounts, a serious dick and a born curmudgeon.  But he was effing smart, and his scientific accomplishments surely compensate for, say, his bloodthirsty reign as Warden of the Royal Mint, and even his really petty and childish vendettas against other scientists.

“‘A was a man.  Take him for all in all.  I shall not look upon his like again.”

Ah, but there’s a catch (or a rub, since we’re quoting Shakespeare):  Newton was born on December 25th according to the Julian calendar.  The Gregorian calendar* did already exist, but England did not adopt it until sometime after Newton’s birth.  They were sort of stubborn about going along with Catholic innovations, and it held them back.  I blame Oliver Cromwell.

Anyway, by the modern, “Gregorian” calendar, Newton would have been born sometime in about…January, something like the 7th, I think, but I’ll look it up (see below).

Why the disparity?  Well, as you may know, the Julian calendar does have leap years.  Earth’s trip around the sun takes 365 and about a quarter days, so the extra full day builds up and is added onto every 4th year.  Except…

…well, it’s not quite a full quarter of an extra day there in that orbital period.  So, over time, the Julian calendar gets ahead of the literal year a bit.  It’s a small bit, but it’s there, and it accumulates.  To correct for this, one of the things the Gregorian calendar does is to skip the leap day on any year divisible by 100**.  It also adds the leap day back on every year divisible by 1000, but I think that’s only applied once since the Gregorian calendar was created.

Anyway, by the time the Gregorian calendar was put in place in England, the Julian calendar had accumulated something like 11 extra leap days.  Maybe it was 12.  If January 7th was the Gregorian date of the 25th of December, Julian, that would be, let’s see…I think 14 days.  I suspect I’m off a bit in my recollection, so I’ll look it up and add a footnote***.

Wow, that was a weird, discursive post, wasn’t it?  I guess it’s probably more entertaining than hearing me talk about my problems with my mental health, at least.  Indeed, one might say that I am instead hereby demonstrating my problems with my mental health‒some of them, at least.  Anyway, I hope this was at least mildly entertaining and possibly informative.  It’s at least probably better than my previous two posts.  In any case, I hope you have a very good day.

*Named for Pope Gregory Peccary the Nocturnal Gregarious Wild Swine.

**I mean “evenly divisible”, of course.  Every number is divisible by 100.  Pi is divisible by 100:  ℼ/100.  “i” is divisible by 100:  i/100.  See?  But they don’t give integer quotients.

***Here goes:  Newton’s birthday would have been January 4th of the following year according to the Gregorian calendar.  This is ten days that needed to be skipped by the Gregorian calendar, or a thousand years worth of Julian calendar mismatch.  By now there would have been about five more extra days in the Julian calendar, so your birthday would be officially labelled as whatever day is 15 days before what it is, Gregorian Style.

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Your dates are numbered

Okay.  Well.  It’s Tuesday now, and it is the second day of June in 2026.  That’s a borderline almost mildly fun date to write out:  6-2-2026.  It has sixes and twos, mainly (though there is a zero in there, which I’m not sure my mind will let me discount despite its lack of any magnitude), and it is almost palindromically arranged when in the US format of date writing.  There are even three twos, which add up to six, and that might be cool…except for the fact that there are two sixes, so if we’re thinking that way, we would need six twos.  That would also be a more pleasing number of twos, given everything.  Unfortunately, I don’t know if there will ever be such a date.

Let’s see…2-22-2226 has six twos but only one 6, whereas 2-22-2266 has two sixes but only five twos.  I guess 2-22-22,266 will be good, but that is quite a long way in the future.  I doubt very much that I will be alive 20,000 plus years from now.  I’m not sure of 20,000 minutes!  Actually, again, let’s see…there are 24 x 60 minutes in a day, so that is 1440 minutes in a day, and so 20,000 minutes would be only around two weeks.  Okay, so I will probably still be alive in 20,000 minutes.

Let’s see (a third time)…20,000 hours would be about 833 days, so a bit over two years.  That’s quite a bit more doubtful than two weeks, but still not a crazy possibility.

As for 20,000 days, well that’s getting quite unlikely.  That’s just under 55 years, which would make me almost twice my current age.  Again, that’s quite unlikely, and I’m rather glad that it is.

20,000 weeks is not really worth considering.  If I were to live for centuries, it would only be because of astonishing medical advances* that presumably would have cured or at least ameliorated my many dysfunctions, so I would probably feel much happier than I do now or have felt for many, many years.

Speaking of many, many years, 20,000 months would obviously be well over a thousand years (20 being well over 12, as I’m sure is obvious).  If we’re going to consider that, then we have to invoke the same kinds of pseudo-miracles as we did for 20,000 weeks, we just need around four and a half times more of them, so to speak.

How the hell did I get onto this subject, or topic, or whatever it is?  Oh, right, I was noting the numerals in today’s date and how they came teasingly close to being fun, but don’t quite make it.

For those of you who might be puzzled by my use of the word “fun” when dealing with simply pointless patterns or lack thereof in things like dates, well…I like numbers.  It’s similar to the way I also like words.  I like words when they’re used to convey interesting information, and when they’re used to tell interesting stories, and when they’re combined and juxtaposed in beautiful and/or amusing ways to make poetry‒and I also sometimes like nonsensical wordplay and puns.

Also, of course, while “fun” may or may not have some manner of absolute scale, like temperature, nevertheless, as with temperature, our experience of fun is a relative one.  Tepid water can feel quite cool when you’re coming out of a sauna, but would feel nicely warm if you had just come inside to escape a bitter winter storm.

Fun can be similar.  So, if you’re used to having a goodly amount of fun in your life, then noting patterns and relations within ordinary “numbers”** can seem rather dull, even if you’re fond of numbers.

But if your life is as pathetic and irritating, on a day to day basis, as mine is, why then even simple, stupid, pointless things can seem somewhat positive.  The value of the function at that point is still well below the x-axis, but it’s not as far below, for that brief moment in which one notes an amusing numerical coincidence***.

That’s all theoretical today, though, because as I noted, today’s date doesn’t quite measure up.  It’s somewhat disappointing, but at least I was able to write an idiotic little blog post about it.

*I can, of course, think of various horror story scenarios in which someone could keep living for centuries and yet continue to deteriorate, but not be able to die.  These are probably quite a bit less likely even than the “medical advances” scenario.

**Why did I use the “scare quotes” there?  Because dates, even when expressed numerically, are not really numbers.  They are more of a code or a location marker, just a kind that uses numerals as its digits because they are memorable and at least correlate with some physical externalia.  “Phone numbers” are even less to be thought of as true numbers.  Their digits don’t even signify anything logically or arguably numerical.  “Phone address” would be a more accurate term.

***Yes, yes, I know, the specific placement of the x and y (and z, etc.) axes is arbitrary, so one can shift one’s target axis down‒lowering one’s expectations, perhaps‒and not need to change the shape of the function.  That may be true, but one does change the integral and the absolute value of the function, so it is not the same, unless one throws in a constant that exactly corrects for the shift in the axis.  In which case, what the hell are you doing wasting our time with this crap?

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You’re so vain, you probably think that nothing matters

I was going to start by saying that I had probably written all I could about Friday the 13th and the fact that there are 2 in a row when non-leap year Februaries have Fridays the 13th, and that a first glance might lead one to think this should happen roughly every 7 years on average*.  However, as I noted last time I discussed this, because the leap year day is in February, we will not have the two-in-a-row Fridays the 13th (February and March) as often as we might otherwise; it will not happen every 7 years on average.

Then, this morning, after recalling that today was Friday the 13th, I ran through the next years’ Fridays in my head in the shower, and it occurred to me that the next Friday the 13th in February‒which will be in 6 years, as I noted in the past‒will not be followed by a Friday the 13th in March!  2032 (six years from now) will be a leap year, so there will be 29 days in February, so there will be no Friday the 13th in that March.

The next paired ones, then, will be a further 5 years after that, in 2037 (not a leap year).  It would have been 6 years later, but there are two leap years in that interval, 2032 and 2036, so the next one comes a year sooner than it would otherwise.

It occurred to me that, because of the frequency of leap years, which is almost twice that of the cycles of days of the week, the frequency of those paired dates may well be once every 11 years rather than every 7.  At least those are both prime numbers.  I’m not going to work out some exact formula right now, though.  It’s not really important.

Of course, one could say that nothing is truly important, and I am persuadable along those lines.

There is a Doctor Who Christmas Special (the one from series 5) in which the antagonist/guest protagonist (played by Michael Gambon!) describes a woman in a cryo chamber as “nobody important”, and the Doctor characteristically responds by saying, “Nobody important?  Blimey, that’s amazing.  You know, in 900 years of time and space, I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before.”

This is typical Doctor, of course, but it raises the objection Dash (from The Incredibles) voiced when told that everyone is special:  Saying that everyone is important can be the same thing as saying no one is.

Of course, important is in the eye of the beholder.  But then again, the beholder is not important, either, except in its own subjective estimation and perhaps that of a few other, equally unimportant, owners of such eyes.

So, yeah, one could argue relative and subjective importance from local points of view, which is valid but more or less vacuous outside its small scale as far as I can see.  On a cosmic scale, it’s all just dust and shadows.  But you could also say that about the entirety of the cosmos itself.

I guess import has always been subjective, even though people are not inclined to see it that way.  But, of course, people are the products of their “local” forces, and they are not responsible for the laws of nature, nor for the things which have happened in the past that have affected them in the present (which could come under a certain interpretation of “the laws of nature” in and of itself).  I won’t get into all that now.

Going back to the shower, but on an entirely different subject, I was also thinking about the effects of diminishing amounts of shampoo in the bottle on the center of gravity of the bottle.  At the start, when it’s full, the center of gravity is roughly in the geometric center of volume of the whole thing.  But as one uses the shampoo, the center of gravity shifts lower and lower, since the air replacing shampoo in the upper part of the bottle is much less dense than the shampoo or the bottle.

But then, as one gets to the dregs, the smaller and smaller amount of shampoo in the bottle contributes less and less to the overall mass distribution of the bottle and its contents, and the center of mass begins to head back up.  Finally, when the bottle is “empty”, the center of gravity will have returned to almost the same place it was when the bottle was full.

All that’s fairly trivial, well-known stuff, I know.  But it got me to thinking about how much of the laws of physics, such as the laws of gravitation (Newtonian form), are solved using such concepts as the center of mass, which is really just a way of combining and averaging the effects of numerous tiny bits of gravitating material as if they were concentrated at one point.

Much of the mathematics of physics works this way, coarsely approximating the very fine details of reality in a way that provides reliable, reproducible guidelines and can produce testable predictions.

But the granularity of reality doesn’t actually ever go away, not at any level.  Even at the level of the quantum wavefunction of a single “particle”, the actual behavior of the thing as it interacts with things in the “larger” world is the summation of the effects of all the possible quantum states of the electron superposed upon each other and interacting with things‒everything‒which are also just collections of superpositions of quanta.  That superposition happening in a “space” that doesn’t directly coincide with the macroscopic space we experience, but whatever its dimensions are, they are real, because they have durable, reproducible effects.

Mathematics may be unreasonably effective in the physical sciences, as Eugene Wigner famously noted, but it seems not to be a refining of description but rather an averaging out, a glossing over, the inking of an underlying rough pencil drawing which nevertheless still constitutes the real, original picture.

It may be that, in a sense, all science is just various forms of statistical mechanics.  We know that, at larger scales, we definitely need the tools of probability and statistics to navigate as best we can the territory of reality.  And yet, we don’t teach this sort of stuff to most people, ever.  I wrote a post about this on Iterations of Zero, if I remember correctly.

I could go on about all this rather easily, I guess, but I am using my smartphone today, and my thumbs are getting sore.  That’s okay; yesterday’s post was probably way too long, anyway.

If I did a video of my thoughts on this I might be able to get into more detail, though it would probably be even more erratic and tangential than my writing.  Still, maybe it would be worth trying.

In the meantime, I’ll write at you again tomorrow.

*Go ahead, do a search on my blog page for Friday the 13th; I’m all but sure it will bring up the pertinent blog posts.