What is in your pocketses, my precious? Today, there should be a poem, at least if you live in New York city. Poems eh? When is the last time you read one? Almost forgot that they existed? Well they do. Here’s part of one I like (Among School Children, Yeats), where he basically sums up all of philosophy:

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

I like Aristotle’s approach, very solid.

It is a fairly well known fact that in any group of people, the odds of two of those people sharing the same birthday is a lot higher than you would expect.  Once the group size is over 60 or so it is practically guaranteed that some of them share birthdays.  The key to understand it: think of how many possible pairs of people there are in the group, rather than just the number of people.  Wikipedia has a good write-up of the math.  If you don’t believe it, you can see the effect graphically.

This is a case where binaversaries can act a little differently to regular birthdays.  The chances of people within a group sharing the same binaversary depends on the age distribution in that group; if they are all the same age then the situation is the same as for birthdays, otherwise the odds decrease according to how wide the distribution is.

In preparation for Valentine’s day, we’re expanding our romantic things to do online list. We’ve given some tips for finding unusual reasons to celebrate (including the fooaversary discussion from this blog). For example, for February 14th, why send a boring old Valentine’s greeting when you could send a card celebrating:

• The first trainload of oranges leaves Los Angeles (February 14, 1886)
• Edward Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, becomes the first member of the British royal family to ride in an automobile (February 14, 1896)
• Aretha Franklin tapes “RESPECT” (February 14, 1967)

(facts gathered from the History Channel and Scopesys sites).

Update: we’ve made some sample cards for these alternate valentines.

Mmm… make sweet cake!

Previous posts have sparked an interest in “foo-aversaries” of all kinds - anniversaries of particular events, perhaps counted in particular ways, that have been given special names. Here’s some interesting ones I’ve been able to dig up, with links to examples of use or explanations.

1. Meetaversary: an anniversary of a first meeting.
2. Dateaversary: an anniversary of a first date.
3. Kissaversary: an anniversary of a first kiss. A suggested alternative name is annikissary.
4. Electroversary: an anniversary celebrated a year before the event (because electrons have a charge of “-1″). For example, one year before a planned wedding during a long engagement.
5. Postaversary: hitting a significant number (such as 100) of blog posts.
6. Blogaversary: an anniversary of starting a blog.
7. Post-liver-transplant-aversary: exactly what it says. A cause for celebration indeed.
8. Binaversary: an anniversary or birthday celebrated at 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, … years.
9. Cataversary: an anniversary of getting a cat.
10. Fooaversary: an anniversary of some random thing.

The traditional gifts associated with various wedding anniversaries are arbitrary and inconsistent. For example, in Britain the 4th anniversary is celebrated with fruit and flowers, while in the US it is silk or linen. And that’s just the tradition; according to Wikipedia, the modern gift for the 4th is “appliances.” Reading the full list, the modern gifts look like they’ve been nobbled by commercial interests. Clocks? Desk sets? Fashion jewelry? Pfff.

Mrs. Bell and I follow a different system. Dmitri Mendeleev to the rescue! Since he went to all that work to organize all the elements in a nice ordered Periodic Table, why reinvent the wheel for weddings? Our first anniversary was our Hydoversary (element 1: H, hydrogen), then came our Heliaversary (element 2: He, helium), and so on.

In this system, a big landmark comes when you reach iron (element 26: Fe, iron). This is the first element at which fusion ceases to be energetically advantageous. In other words, after this point, you’d better have gotten the hang of this marriage thing, you won’t be able to rely on physics alone to help you stick together.

Mrs. Bell and I had a rather long engagement, which in fact allowed us to celebrate our Electroversary (-1: a free electron) one year before our wedding.

You can’t say that we didn’t start as we meant to go on.

Hooray for cheese!

(just testing a youtube plugin for wordpress)

For those not ready to switch from celebrating regular birthdays every year to celebrating binaversaries every power-of-two years, you can still save on candles by basing them on binary code. There seem to be some variants out there, but the one I like best is that suggested at halfbakery or used by a touch of grey, which is to put in a candle for each binary digit you want, and then just light those that correspond to binary one.

For binaversaries, you just use regular candles. Running out of space for candles is not likely to happen to you in your lifetime, unless you live to something like 65536 years (16 byears). So that’s one less problem…

As you get older, birthdays seem to matter less. In fact, their significance seems to fall off at a roughly logarithmic rate. I think it makes sense to celebrate binary birthdays for each year that is a power of two: years 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and (if you are very lucky) 128. That feels about right. And then we could quote our age as 0 byears (1+ years), 1 byear (2+ years), 2 byears (4+ years), 3 byears (8+ years), 4 byears (16+ years), 5 byears (32+ years), or 6 byears (64+ years), and celebrate those binary birthdays or “binaversaries.”

It makes life seem a little more orderly somehow. We are children through age 3 byears, generally settle down during our fourth byear, work to retirement in our fifth byear, then often die at the age of 6 byears. If we’re not so lucky, we have a few byears less, but somehow the variation seems less drastic.

I’m happy to have lived 4 full and joyful byears, and so far byear 5 is pretty nifty too.