Postcard from Bishkek

I am renowned for forgetting birthdays.  A friend of mine, however, tells me that he has no problem remembering birthdays in his family.  For some reason, or quirk of fate, they seem to fall on an incredible sequence of dates:  January 1st, February 2nd, March 3rd, and so on.  When I first heard this, the mathematician in me wondered what the odds were of something like this happening, but after a short period of reflection I decided that it was too difficult, even to decide exactly where to begin thinking about a calculation, and it remains just a thought at the back of my mind.

Today, November 11th, is another one of these days, and I find myself wondering to which his erstwhile relatives he will be sending a Birthday Card.

Today is, however, even more significant.  Every year has a  January 1st, February 2nd, March 3rd, and so on, but today is November 11th, 2011, or 11/11/11 – and, what is more,  it doesn’t matter which endian you are using.

For the record: endian is a computing term which refers to the way the individual subcomponents of a date are written:

• Big endian – starting with the year, as in yy/mm/dd, the convention used in China, Japan,Korea, Iran, Hungary, Lithuania and some others …
• Middle endian – starting with the month, as in mm/dd/yy, the convention used in the United States and , (interestingly – I have no idea why), the former British colony of Belize
• Little endian – starting with the day, as in dd/mm/yy, the convention used in most of the rest of the world, (Europe, Asia, Latin America, North Africa and Australasia.

Some countries seem to manage to cope using two different competing systems, presumably deciding which one is in use in any particular case by the context.

The Big endian is used extensively in computing because it makes the storage and sorting of dates easier.  Using the other two conventions means having to store each component separately but using the big endian means that they can be stored as one “string” or even as a numerical value.

Incidentally, when I taught computing, one of the programming exercises I used to set classes was to program “a clock” which would count up to ten, then up to a hundred, then a thousand; followed by a program to count the seconds in order to display the time in hours, minutes and seconds; and then one to display the date … the use of date and time functions, of course weren’t allowed.  It was a nice exercise because it could easily be adapted to suit the class, (simplified or extended), and a variety of programming concepts, (such conditional statements, nested loops, lists and arrays … ) as well as showing what looks like a simple task really breaks down to a complicated set of micro tasks.

Anyway, 11/11/11 seems to some people to have some sort of mystical significance.  On youtube, for example, there are a whole host of videos tying this particular date into prophecies.  I don’t want to give any of them credit so I won’t bother giving any links.  Most of them ignore the fact that the calendar is a man made construct and totally arbitrary, as demonstrated from the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendars which gives us in Kyrgyzstan at least two Christmases, two New Years and a celebration of the Great October Revolution in November.

They also seem to ignore the fact that this is not the first time that mankind has encountered the date 11/11/11, because there is one every century!  The last one was on November 11th, 1911.

There is even a horror  film “11/11/11”, which is subtitled “The End is Now”, in which an author, after his death of his wife and child, travels to Barcelona to see his estranged brother and dying father, where he learns that his life is plagued by events that occur on … you’ve guessed it … 11/11/11.

Now it is true that on the last time we encountered 11/11/11 there was, indeed, a strange phenomenon – one that affected the Central United States: The Great Blue Norther.  A cold front that swept across the region caused by an extremely strong storm system separating two large air masses: warm, humid air and frigid, arctic air.  Many cities had record high temperatures in the early afternoon, followed by a record drop in temperatures by nightfall. Many cities in the Midwest were able to break record highs and lows for the same day. Springfield, Missouri, for example, recorded a high of 80°F (27°C) before the cold front, 40°F (4°C) by nightfall, and a record low of 13°F (-11°C) by midnight.

 

On this momentous date, I prefer to think of the significance of a different November 11th: that which fell in the year 1918, when it wasn’t just the 11’s in the date, but also the in the time which gave an added poignancy.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, … the guns all across the Western Front in Europe fell silent as the Armistice between the Allies and Germany came into effect, ceasing hostilities and ending the First World War, (although hostilities continued in other regions, especially across the former Russian Empire and in parts of the old Ottoman Empire).

In between the wars, this was commemorated as a national holiday in many of the allied nations – in Britain it was called Armistice Day and a two minute silence fell across the country at 11:00am as a sign of respect for the approximately sixty million people who their lives in the conflict.  In the States, it was known as Veterans Day.  In 1939, the ceremonial activities were moved to the nearest Sunday to November 11th, so that it wouldn’t interfere with wartime production, and following the Second World War it was transformed to Remembrance Day to commemorate those who died in both conflicts.

 

For Australians, November 11th has a different significance.  On this day in 1975, Sir John Kerr, the Governor General, dismissed the Labour government of Gough Whitlam and invented the conservative leader Malcolm Fraser to form a government, sparking a constitutional crisis.  It was such a landmark event that Australians who lived through it can still recite where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news in the same way that Americans can tell you where they were when they heard the news about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

 

Other momentous occasions have happened on This Day in History.  The fact that they happened to occur on a day which seemed to have some mathematically unique identity, (11/11/11), is not evidence of any specific metaphysical force or influence … but that doesn’t stop people looking for, or speculating, about one.

Whatever, I suppose it provides a good excuse for a party – or at least another cake.

Tags: Calendar, Expat, History