Blog: A Day In The Life
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Monday, 4 January 2010
MMX
Another new year, in fact a new decade. I was born in the 1980s so it's the fourth decade I've lived to see. Astonishingly, my maternal grandparents have lived to see eleven decades! They were born in the 1910s (1914 and 1916) and have lived through the 10s, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and the 10s again! They're 93 and 95 now and doing very well, although starting to slow down the last couple of years.2010 is MMX in Roman Numerals, 7DA in Hexadecimal, 11111011010 in binary...
Speaking of binary, I noticed that since the last two digits of the year are '10', the date, in DDMMYY format, can be in binary nine times this year - on the 1st, 10th & 11th of the 1st, 10th & 11th months of 2010. By this I mean that when concatenated, these six digits can be made up of only ones and zeros, such as 1st January 2010 = 01/01/10 => 010110 which is a binary number which can be expressed as the decimal number 22. I tweeted this and got into a discussion with a fellow mathematician and twitterer @peterrowlett about the interesting properties of this. I pointed out that since it would always end in '10', the number would always be even so it could never be prime (which would be very cool, obviously) and said maybe in 2011. Peter replied saying that the binary dates in 2011 are prime more often than not (primes: 23, 31, 43, 47, 59. not: 27, 39, 55, 63.) Boy - that provides us with five prime binary days to celebrate next year! I can hardly wait!
The reason I mentioned Peter in this was our common interest in interesting properties of numbers, particularly interesting sequences of numbers in dates - which became apparent on 7th August 2009 at precisely 12:34:56 (at which time the time & date could be written as 12:34:56 7/8/9 or 123456789). An even more interesting occurrence along these lines is in the year ending in 89 (1989 or 2089) when the zero can be included: 01:23:45 6/7/89 or 0123456789, or even 1990/2090: 12:34:56 7/8/90 or 1234567890.
Numbers are brilliant, aren't they? Don't forget π day on March 14th (at pi second at 3/14 1:59:26pm) or square root day (the last one was last year - 03/03/09 - the next not till 04/04/16! They get more rare and spread out as time goes on!
Unix Timestamp
Unix time at the strike of midnight on 1st January 2010 was 1262304000. That's the number of seconds since 1st January 1970, which is what computers use to keep track of time. There will be a problem tantamount to the Millennium Bug which will occur at 03:14:08* on 19th January 2038, whereby the timestamp (currently a signed 32-bit integer, will be reset to 1901 as the signed bit will make the number negative, being expressed as a negative number of seconds since 1970, taking it back to 1901 as you can see:
*I don't think the 3.14 part is related to π at all, just coincidence...
However, don't all go jumping out of the window just yet - as we get closer to 2038 we'll start using higher bit types (it's more complicated than that but you can read a full solution explanation on wikipedia).
Interestingly, Unix time passed 1,000,000,000 seconds on 9th September 2001 at 01:46:40 and 1,234,567,890 seconds on 13th February 2009 at 23:31:30.
Twenty-Ten
I'm sick of hearing people say 'two thousand and ...' when referring to years 2010 onwards - it's only because the years 2001-2009, as an exception, were pronounced that way because they didn't sound right in the usual format (although I don't think it would have been too bad to have said Twenty-Oh-Five). Now it's 2010 we can go back to the normal format we've always used. We 1999 as 19-99, 1901 as 19-01, 1066 as 10-66, and so on. There's a website devoted to promoting the correct pronunciation: http://www.twentynot2000.com/.
Burj Khalifa
Oh and the new tallest building in the world was officially opened at the start of the year. The Burj Khalifa in Dubia stands proud at 828m, meaning falling from its height would have you reaching a speed of about 285 miles per hour by the time you hit the floor, which would take 13 seconds!
Labels: Computers, Internet, Maths, New Year
Posted by Ben Nuttall at 22:35 
