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.

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.

Count to 31 on one hand? No problem, if you know binary. Watch the video.

Or you could count to 1023 on two hands. Or 1048575 with hands and feet. That would be a rather boring video though…

Basically, the trick is to decide on an order of your fingers/thumb. Then move the first one up/down every count, the second one up/down every second count, the third one up/down every fourth count, the fourth one up/down every eighth count, etc.

There’s a detailed explanation of slightly different methods at Mr Speaker and intuitor. Wikipedia calls it “finger binary.” The oldest known web source for this seems to be lyzrdstomp.

Last note on this subject - Brownie posted a page explaining the math of binaversaries. He makes a good case for it I think. Basically, counting your age in logarithms makes the passing of the years a lot less stressful. The major drawback I see is that it makes for a lot less cake and presents…

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.

Via boingboing, a knitting pattern for daleks. Given my first name, I’ve always had a strong fellow-feeling for these little rascals. Who doesn’t, from time to time, feel the urge to exterminate, exterminate, conquer the galaxy, crush the lesser races, obtain unimaginable power, unlimited rice pudding, etc etc? Every young infant should have a fuzzy robotic killer to cuddle and chew on.

If you’re blank, you can blank! Did you know that? Gosh headlines are fun!

Apparently if you want to be effective in life, you need to eat an entire menagerie (see point 2). And here’s me sitting drinking a cup of tea, I’m getting it wrong on so many levels!

Looks like a How-To Do-it-yourself guide to destroying the Earth is in the works. So many people out there who want to figure out how to build the button. But never press it. Heavens no.

Sam Hughes gives a careful, methodical analysis of how to destroy the Earth for real. Here’s the preamble:

Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe.

You’ve seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You’ve heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you’ve had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I (Sam Hughes) can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.

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