This year my birthday fell on the not-so-lucky day of Friday the 13th February. I’m pleased to say that nothing unlucky happened, but it did get me thinking about the date. Can the previous events of your particular birthday explain anything about you today? Perhaps only for the superstitious or the people who have had significantly cool things happen on their birthday.
Looking back into the history of my own birth date, I find that William Shockley, a British born American physicist (Born 13th Feb 1910) was named by Times Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. The Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics announced their discovery of the universe’s largest known white dwarf star (named Lucy, after The Beatles well known song) back in 2004.
If I was a scientist, this would be looking good. However, these events don’t help me describe any kind of historic trait that could have lead the superstitious to believe that I was destined to be a computer geek. But wait…
February 13th 2009 at 23:31 UTC marks the exact moment when the epoch according to Unix time was exactly ‘1234567890’ seconds. Unix time measures the number of elapsed seconds since January 1, 1970.
1234567890 / 60 / 60 / 24 / 365 = 39.148… years. So, 1970 + 39.148 years is roughly equal to my birthday this year. To summarise, if I was superstitious, I might believe that I have been destined to be a geek ever since 1 Jan 1970.