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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Wednesday, February 20, 2002
18:48 - 200220022002, or something
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/02/20/world.time/index.html

(top) link
Yeahp-hh... it's that time again. Well, maybe not again, but it always feels like the same damn thing yet another time when we come up against some supposedly significant date or time. Tonight, in case you haven't heard, is 20:02, 20/02/2002-- a palindromic date/time.

Now, I'm the first to admit that having the HP workstations in the UGCS lab all simultaneously emit a squawking .au of "Pi Time!" to the lab stereo rig at exactly 3:14 in the morning is a whole lotta fun. I'll even get behind "Pi Time Texas Style" like we had one year, where at 3:00PM (see, Texas once legislated pi to be equal to 3) the whole hovse ate a variety of pies in the dining room. And I'll also acknowledge the importance of certain times that may present programmatic challenges, such as Y2K, 9/9/99, and S1G.

But when we have to go to such bizarre lengths as we're doing tonight to convince ourselves that there's some cosmic meaning to stupid numbers, I very rapidly run out of patience.

First of all, as should be very obvious, "20:02, 20/02/2002" is a very arbitrary designation for a particular date and time, and there are a dozen other ways of spelling it that are just as valid. The typical American arrangement for the date, for example, is 02/20/2002, and we don't usually use the 24-hour clock. Besides, what time zone is this supposed to apply to? And why do astrologers and numerologists and "palindromists" like the one in the article continue to insist that there is some correlation between how fast the earth spins in space (the time of day) and how fast the earth swings around the sun (the date)? To say nothing, naturally, of all the parts of the world that don't happen to go by our year-numbering scheme, even if they did accept that an arbitrary line drawn through Greenwich was somehow tied in to the cosmic ley lines and planets millions of miles away and had some profound effect on us in our daily lives.

"For two to three minutes there will be a massive surge of positive consciousness. It will be a moment to bring healing, a moment to bring peace," [Israeli psychic Uri Geller] said.

Asked how he would co-ordinate the meditations of his followers around the world, Geller said:

"I would appreciate everyone concentrating in GMT [Greenwich Mean Time], but if you can't do that, take a moment when you can ... The message is be positive, be optimistic and believe in yourself."

All right, fine, can't complain about those goals. But I just fine it dreadfully discouraging that we have to make up these kinds of stupid excuses before we can justify being positive and believing in ourselves. Yeah, on all those meaningless non-Greenwich-centered non-Gregorian non-European maybe-ordering-the-numbers-slightly-differently non-palindromic days, feel free to snarl at people and spend your days in despair and misery, because it'll all be made okay by the worldwide surge of positivity and peace when all the little LCD readouts on the cesium clocks line up in a certain magical way.

Hey, if it helps you, great. Go nuts. I'm not standing in anyone's way if they want to pretend that tonight all the world's nuclear warheads will mysteriously disarm themselves and al Qaeda's lurking sleepers will be struck with the unaccountable impression that they're really Zen Buddhist monks and that keeping the gravel in their rock gardens immaculately raked is more important than there being a McDonald's in Kabul. It'd be nice, yes. But you know, the sun don't care 'bout these things.

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© Brian Tiemann