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This Rare Friday the 13th
Juha-Matti Laurio writes to point out a Washington Times story about how special this particular Friday the 13th is. The digits in the numerical notation for the date add up to 13 — whether you write it in the US or the European form. From the article: "The phenomenon hasn't happened in 476 years, said Heinrich Hemme, a physicist at Germany's University of Aachen who crunched the numbers to find that the double-whammy last occurred Jan. 13, 1520."
While the sum of 2+6+1+1+3=13 is mildly interesting, I never thought much about Friday the Thirteenth outside of Pogo strips. Walt kelly's character in the strip, Churchy LaFemme perhaps more than any other source kept the Friday the Thirteenth fear alive as the turtle fled in horror for decades, long before the series of films arrived. For those of us who remember (and in some cases still read) the strip, it's still a source of amusement.
"Don't shoot! Don't shoot! It's Friday the thirteenth! Very unlucky to get shot on Friday the thirteenth!"
2+6+1+1+4=14, so there goes Saturday the 14th too.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
From TFS:
What a relief! I always suspected that the commutativity of addition applied on both sides of the Atlantic.Or did they mean to imply that the dæmons who govern paraskevidekatria are too preoccupied to uphold mathematical principles today?
In a related article:
sorry....
yo.
Just to prove to him its not his lucky day.
well, maybe so, but to an american, anything non-american is "european". which also means randomly different, but not so much that it matters unless you are also european yourself.
sorry -- americans are like that.
Halloween, however, is celebrated on October 31, therefore, it's only superstitious for those crazy Europeans who insist on writing the date backwards.
; D
I only mod funny =D
10+13+2006 = 2029 2+0+2+9 = 13 aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh! all hell is breaking loose!!!!!!!
I always confuse Halloween and Christmas.
- Octo Weinstein
Slashdot is behind the times again! According to all my calendars, it's been Saturday the 14th for 13 hours already :)
From TFA:-
'"Pure chance," the good professor told the press yesterday. '
Er right then, and there was me thinking the dates were pretty much predictable. I have a sort of flip chart thing on my wall that has successfully predicted all the dates this year - in sequence! It has pictures of cars on it too, which is nice.
Unlucky my ass. I was #7 for preordering my Wii this morning....
And for the rest of us, the overwhelming majority of rational folks, [...]
Wow.
What country do you live in?
Can I come?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Cartman: Twelve contains the numbers 1 and 2 just like the toilet yesterday where somebody went #2 instead of #1. Add 2 and 1 with 911 and you get 914. Drop the 4 and its 91. Exactly the score Kyle got on his spelling test 12 days after 9/11!
By my calculation $457.3 billion dollars are lost in productivity annually by calculating lost productivity statistics.
(You don't want to know the number for making obvious jokes on slashdot).
No, it's 10/13/2006, which is lucky 0.00038346499
JJ Abrams called, he wants his calculator back.
But don't shoot them today! That would just convince more people that Friday the 13th is unlucky.
You don't know the CS grads I work with - many of them would have trouble writing a program to display the current date...