Ten Times Every Hundred Years...

No, I'm not referring to the sex life of the over-50 crowd.

Early this morning, I slept right through something that happens only ten times every century, and it steered me into several lines of thought.

Shortly after two o'clock this morning, if you had a digital clock and calendar you would have seen the time and date represented as 02:03:04, 05/06/07 - an interesting numerical lineup. Such a juxtaposition of numbers can only occur ten times every hundred years, since there are only twelve months in a year and twelve usable hours on the digital clock face (European or military style time, in which 2:00 PM = 1400, won't work because it exceeds the number of months available).

I checked one of my favorite blogs this morning, It Is A Numeric Life (see the link in my list at the left), and was surprised to see that he hadn't picked up on this interesting bit of numeric trivia. But it did get me thinking about something else: the meaning and use of the terms clockwise and counterclockwise.

Some years ago, I read an article in which the author hypothesized that the terms clockwise and counterclockwise would eventually disappear from our vocabulary as digital clocks replaced the standard dial faces, with nothing obvious to replace them.

This is a potential catastrophe!

As a ballroom dancer, I know that the line of dance which keeps traffic order on the dance floor runs counterclockwise around the room. As a linguist, I have to wonder how to explain the concept if I can't relate it to the movement of hands around a clock face. Somehow "keep your right side toward the outer edge of the floor" just doesn't have the same simple elegance as "move counterclockwise around the room."

It's just one more simple example of things we lose with the relentless onward march of technology.

But for now, if you want to see that marvelous digital lineup with which I started this entry, you'll have to wait until just past 3:00 AM on June 7th of next year.

But don't call to let me know, because I don't plan to wake up for the celebration.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo