BIIK://35: New Celebrations

If you’re like me, you love a bank holiday but hate what most of them stand for. So, this past year I’ve tried out some new celebrations. Below are seven examples, which I invite you to remix and repurpose for your own festivities.

My friend Mitch introduced me to the idea of calculating the midpoint between your birthday and the birthday of a friend, so that the two of you have a unique day to celebrate together when you’re not busy celebrating with everybody else on your actual birthday. Co-member Carl and I calculated this for ourselves, and now we have an annual celebration at 11:14AM EDT on May 30th.

Generally no, but sometimes yes. I wrote a script to check the temperature in both cities every 10 minutes and tell me when it’s colder in Phoenix than Boston. It has been running for a year now which, fans of the musical Rent will know, means that I’ve gathered 52,560 data points. Over this past year, there have been 57 unique times that it’s been colder in Phoenix totalling 9,520 minutes, or 6.6 days. The longest stretch was between 7:06PM on April 3 and 12:26PM on April 4 AZ time. In general, these inversions occur overnight in the springtime when it stays unseasonably warm in Boston, and again in the early mornings in the fall and winter when the sun rises in Boston and it’s still dark in Phoenix. The most recent occurrence was for six hours on January 9-10 when Phoenix and Boston were both in the mid forties overnight.

In anticipation of having a baby this past spring, I built a little device to check whether anyone in our family was living on a prime number day of their life. The day I set it up, two of us happened to share a prime day which felt coincidental, but I had no idea how coincidental. Eight months in, I can now say that two of us share a prime day about once every three weeks, which is way more frequent than I thought. Reason being is that the occurrence of prime numbers doesn’t taper off that quickly: you have 72 in your first year and 57 in your second year, but you still have 37 at age 90.

The other thing I hadn’t considered beforehand is that you really only ever have a chance of sharing a prime number day with somebody if they were born an even number of days apart from you, since every prime number (aside from 2) is odd. So as a shorthand, we now say that three of us were born on even days and the baby was born on an odd day, referring to our Julian days, or the number of days elapsed between our birthdays and Monday, January 1, 4713 BC.

One afternoon this past summer, I noted that the baby was in his fourth month while the kid was in his fourth year and I was in my fourth decade. I was able to mentally approximate that the baby’s age as a % of the kid’s age was nearly identical to the kid’s age as a percentage of my own age. So I set up a quadratic formula for the first time in 20 years to calculate the day when the two proportions would be identical. It just so happened to be five days in the future, so we had a little party the next week when the baby was 8.02% of the kid’s age and the kid was 8.02% of my age.

Last winter, Carl and I were regularly meeting with our friend Amos in Aarhus, Denmark quite early in the morning here in Phoenix. As fall turned to winter, he would have less and less daylight illuminating him during our calls, and finally in December he would start the call in daylight and end in darkness just as the sun was rising here. Using timeanddate.com, I verified that on the winter solstice Phoenix and Aarhus only share daylight for 16 minutes. In contrast, on the summer solstice, Aarhus and Phoenix share sunlight for more than eight hours, first after the sun rises in Phoenix and again briefly when the next day begins in Aarhus right before the sun sets in Phoenix. I became infatuated with these stories of shared sunlight, so I made a tool that displays simultaneous sunrise and sunset times around the world, and calculates shared daylight between any set of places.

I now know that New York and Seoul lose shared daylight between Halloween and Valentine’s Day, and that I share daylight every day of the year with two friends who I feel much too far away from in Changshu and Mostar. What I found most surprising is that, aside from the north and south pole, every other pair of locations on earth share daylight for at least a little while each year. And when you add a third location, you can discover situations where a trio of locations only share a few moments of sunlight each year. For instance, Phoenix, Aarhus, and Seoul only share daylight during the month of June, during that brief window of time when the sun rises in Aarhus before it sets the previous day in Phoenix (and is midday in Seoul). I’d love to know what you uncover.

My neighborhood is divided into lots that are bounded by the cardinal directions, meaning that if I stand in my yard with my back straight against my neighbor’s fence, I am looking due east. Since last summer, I’ve been regularly going outside early in the morning with an infant in hand and noticing the way the sun moves across the sky. It is reassuring, particularly now, to eliminate surprises wherever possible: knowing where the sun is going to be provides some small comfort. In June, the sun was on the far left of the photo, just inside the frame established by the 40 foot utility pole (which caught on fire last summer but that’s a different story). Below, you can see the sunrise on the winter solstice much further south, just inside the frame established by the tall palm tree. I’m chuffed to my boots to have these two huge towers in my field of vision serving as boundaries in a cosmic game of pong, constantly passing the sun back and forth.

Katherine and I are fortunate to be able to spend a lot of time with our friend Mirza. When he was in Phoenix over the holidays the three of us (well, mostly me) spent an evening going through old photos, emails, and texts to try and piece together just how many nights we’ve spent under the same roof since we became close friends in 2016. While the answer is quite impressive (417 days, or 12.1% of all days), we all found it interesting (well, again, mostly I found it interesting) that we’ve only been together on 256 unique calendar days. We’ve spent every day together in January, March, and November, but less than half of the days in May, July, and August and only 2 days together in April. Hopefully in the near future or at least, you know, before we die, we can close the gap and spend every calendar day together. That will be a great thing to celebrate.

Thanks for reading,

– Grif