magic

well, it's probably just coincidence, but it's fun nonetheless.

for those of you who don't pay particularly close attention to these sorts of things, the end of this week we have a Friday the 13th coming up. most people think about Friday the 13th as a particularly unlucky day, a superstition the origins of which are much debated. however, growing up, I always noticed that particularly good things would tend to happen to me on Friday the 13th. none of them were particularly momentous -- I won something in a drawing at school, I received some good news about planning a family vacation, I spent the day hanging out with friends -- but they always gave the entire day a "good" vibe.

recently, my attention was called to an interesting numerological fluke; the UNIX time code for 1234567890 resolves to 23:31:30 Feb 13, 2009 (UTC). for those unfamiliar with UNIX time, that means that, at 23:31:30 Feb 13, 2009 (UTC), exactly 1234567890 seconds will have passed since 00:00:00 Jan 1, 1970, a date which is dated as the beginning of the Epoch. for me, this will be 15:31:30. to see how this resolves in your timezone, you can try one of the following:

Mac OS X: date -r 1234567890
Ubuntu Linux (or Debian or similar flavors): date -d @1234567890
other: man date (see what parameters to use to convert UNIX time to local time)

many commenters on the post linked above seem to believe that such coincidence bodes incredible unluckiness, but I like to that that it will be far more lucky than un. as it happens, at that exact second, I will likely be listening to a talk (or questions thereafter) by Ben Schneiderman. not sure what kind of (un)lucky events to expect, but I'm guessing the talk should be pretty good.