But every time you write on a computer, play a music file or add up a number with your phone’s calculator, you are using tools that might not exist without the work of these women.
And Happy Birthday to myself. I’ve crossed over. I’ve reached another dreaded milestone. Today is the first day of my fifth decade.
To make myself feel better about this dubious event, I’ve reverted to two of my favorite past times: math and astronomy.
I decided to calculate how many days I’ve been breathing air on Earth. For that I had to find a date calculator. Plugging in the relevant date (today in 1964 and 2014), the following results popped up:
From and including: Friday, October 2, 1964
To and including: Thursday, October 2, 2014
Result: 18,263 days
It is 18,263 days from the start date to the end date, end date included
Or 50 years, 1 day including the end date
Alternative time units 18,263 days can be converted to one of these units:
1,577,923,200 seconds
26,298,720 minutes
438,312 hours
18,263 days
2609 weeks
In addition, the Earth is travelling through space, via the Milky Way, at the incredible speed of 3,728.23 mps. Roughly, the Earth has moved 5.88286061194e+12 miles since I was born, give or take a few. That equates to approximately 63,256.57 astronomical units. A rolling stone gathers no moss . . .
And the .5c I included in the title of this post? No, I’m not travelling at half the speed of light (except in my dreams). I’m merely reflecting upon reaching my half century mark.
I decided to make a four day weekend out of this auspicious occasion so I’m relaxing at home, reading and doing other none stressful activities. No parties (that I know of) and no surprises. Just Terry, me and the dogs hanging out.
Just another day in the neighborhood. Eighteen thousand two hundred sixty-three and counting.
Pi.
1.The Greek letter P or p, corresponding to the roman p.
2.A number, represented by said letter, expressing the ratio of the circumference of a perfect circle to its diameter. The value of pi has been calculated to many millions of decimal places, to no readily apparent purpose: no perfect circles or spheres exist in nature, since matter is composed of atoms and therefore lumpy, not smooth. Nature herself sometimes takes to rounding off the more extreme decimals of numbers when they get sufficiently small, as Prof. Heisenberg has pointed out. However, the continued extension of pi provides a harmless exercise of computer power which would otherwise be misused playing Quake or surfing pointless web sites.
Meanwhile, back at the office, I need to adorn my otherwise digital-centric workspace with an old school analog clock (and perhaps a sliderule)? One of these might do the trick:
Eventually, I’ll abandon cubicle purgatory and install one of these at home:
And it’s high time, or prime time, to get back to memorizing more digits of pi . . .