Mystical Time

Posted by jns on 4 April 2006

Not to harp on the innumeracy thing (although — plug time! — it is part of the mission of Ars Hermeneutica), but I’m a little irritated.

You see, I keep seeing people for the last few days pointing out, in e-mail and on their blogs^*, that on 5 April something unusual is going to happen. Namely, the time and date at one moment in the wee hourse will be

01:02:03 04/05/06

“This will never happen again!” is trumpeted along with the observation.

Of course, this is incorrect for two contradictory reasons: 1) it isn’t really happening in the first place; and 2) it will happen again.

Dispensing with #2 first, a moment’s reflection quickly shows that because only the last two digits of the year are used in the mystical rendering, this “reading” will happen precisely every 100 years, give or take depending on leap seconds or other adjustments; we could say it will happen exactly every 100 nominal years.

Now, for #1. It should come as no surprise that I am always troubled by mystical malarky like this, but I find it more troubling when it is so arbitrary, depending as it does only on accidents of the way we count time and keep track of days.

For most Europeans, the revelation won’t make any sense because they tend to write the day number before the month, 05/04/06, so clocks won’t get all mystical for them until 4 May. But should the mystical power depend so critically on using only two digits for the date? Oh dear, but 04/05/2006^# just doesn’t do it, does it? All this without even mentioning the different calendars and years observed by different cultures (China, say, or Orthodox Christians or Jews). Also not to mention that it depends on the fact that we divide the day up into 24 hours, and each hour in 60 minutes of 60 seconds each — like that’s natural and deeply meaningful!

I am not, however, totally immune to these accidental coincidences of digits. For instance, I find it useful — as a mnemonic — that Ars Hermeneutica’s incorporation was recorded in the Maryland Department of State at 11:11 on 11 November. Surely that must mean something!

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^* For example, Shakespeare’s Sis mentions it here.

^# Update added barely one hour before the mystical event here in the Central-Daylight-Time timezone: I just realized with some excitement that if only we more generally used a 24-hour clock and wrote our dates euro-style, we could look forward, in just a couple of months, to 20:06 20/06/2006, which is guaranteed never to happen again with our current Gregorian calendar.