A never-to-be-repeated, Historical non-event!

three unrelated tidbits for a Saturday

At three minutes and four seconds after 2 AM on the 6th of May this year, the time and date will be 02:03:04 05/06/07. This will never happen again.
- Scientist, interrupted; Date Weirdness

Funny thing about that is, every second of our lives is designated by a similarly singular series of symbols.  Only their sequentiality surprises us.

2: I might’ve posted this video before but I just ran across it again and it’s so beautiful that I just had to link it for anyone who might have missed it. The Life Of A Cell.  Whether you think God designed it at His drawing board, drinking coffee and smoking Kools (what else would God smoke?), or that it is the result of a billion-year iterative process of mutation, combination, and natural selection, it is still amazing.

Strange confession; I sometimes think about this video and about cellular respiration while I am running up stairs.  100kg of middle-aged monkey processing a bit of oxygen and donut, while the miraculous is hidden. 

3. Computer software users are inclined to blame themselves when they make a mistake, but I always tell them it isn’t their fault because the software is not intuitively designed.  From Good Math, Bad Math, comes a perfect example of why this is so… Bad Software Design; getting the levels wrong.

Updates: the post over on Good Math, Bad Math has acquired a number of very interesting comments.  And the 020304050607 date/time thingie has been featured on ***Dave and SEB, whose commenters both found lots of exceptions to the “never happen again” part.  Fun for the whole family!

Posted by George on 05/05/07 at 11:24 AM
observations •

  1. I’m coming back to chase down your links, but for now… I tell my software users, “Don’t blame yourself. Your mother didn’t teach you this stuff.”

    Posted by breakerslion  on  05/05/07  at  06:45 PM

  2. It’ll happen again on June 5th :p

    Posted by Mina  on  05/05/07  at  11:59 PM

  3. Those are some fantastic links you got there!

    Posted by webs05  on  05/06/07  at  12:13 AM

  4. I liked the monkey vid.  Only quibble: we’re not monkeys.  We’re apes.

    Posted by zilch  on  05/09/07  at  08:04 AM

  5. confused Yeah, and for those of us that were fortunate to be flying back from Eur0pe, it gave the term “JetLag” a greater meaning. Not to mention that I had to fly into CA before going back another hour when arriving in MT. Who’s idea was it anyway? Even the pilot was a bit peaved because the planes clocks weren’t set-up for the early change…

    Posted by 1centwiz  on  05/15/07  at  03:20 PM

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