Where were you at 12:34:56 7/8/9?

By Clay Breshears (Intel) (124 posts) on July 9, 2009 at 8:38 am

I like numbers. I like number facts. I like number patterns. So, I was happy when a good friend from the years of my second stint at graduate school sent me a note about the numerical sequence generated by the time at 25 minutes and four seconds before 1 p.m. on Wednesday, July 8, this year.

Earlier this month, I got an email forwarded by a relative that was touting the numerical sequence at the time of 04:05:06 07/08/09. The message went on to claim how this would never happen again! I wondered if the originator of the post knew something about the future of time/date reckoning that the rest of us hadn't seen coming. Will aliens conquer the human race and switch us to a new numbering system (octal?) in 100 or 1000 years? Perhaps the Pope or the President or the United Nations will convert us to a metric calendar with 10 day weeks, 10 hour days and 10 hour nights, and the 5.25 "mystery days" at the end of each year? If you thought Y2K was a big problem, think about how much work such a metric calendar would require for current software that uses dates. (Dust off your COBOL skillz to make beucoup bucks in software conversion!)

As for me, I was talking to my manager when the clock hit this special sequence in the Central Time Zone (Daylight Savings time). For my manager, he had to wait another two hours before he could live in this moment of time. I'm sure Chinese brides and grooms are looking forward to good fortune at 9 minutes and 9 seconds past 9 a.m. on September 9. For the rest of us, we have 05:06:07 08/09/10 to look forward to in a little over a year's time. Unless the Alien Overlords land and make us all count in base 8, that is.