curiosities

We are entering the Month August tomorrow (which here in Finland is just about an hour away). I've previously written about the history and etymology of the month. But besides those interesting tibits it  also has some curious numerical properties.

The first day of August is never the same weekday as any other month's first day, except during a leap year when it falls into same day as February.

Yesterday I wrote about the tip of the tongue phenomenon. The name stems from the common saying with the similar form "it's just on the tip of my tongue". This is obvious reference to the tongues role in producing the sounds needed for the word. But there are people who can relate to the other function of the tongue at these situations as well. They can actually taste the word.

Synaesthesia is a condition where a person has a cross-wiring between senses in their brain. One of the common examples is when somebody can visualise numbers as different colours.

I hope you are sitting down firmly as I'm about to tell you how fast you are actually going around just sitting there in place.

First of all, your on the surface of this planet, rotating around it's axis. The rotation takes you around the circumference of the planet in one day. To accomplish that, we are spinning around at around 1700km/h (or 0,5km/s). 

New decade or not, we are closing to the end of year 12019. And no, that "1" there is not a typo. I really mean twelve thousand and nineteen. That's the current year in Holocene era.

The Holocene calendar was first proposed by Cesare Emiliani in 1993 (11993 in Holocene calendar). The idea was to resolve some issues with the current anno Domini calendar which causes some trouble handing the transition between the current era (AD) and the time before that (BC). Makes it harder to grasp those old dates when the bigger number actually means it was earlier.

Only a few days left of this year. After that we will be entering into a new decade: twenties. Or are we?

Some people thing the decade doesn't start until the year one e.g. this decade started in 2011 and will last until the end of year 2020. Mathematically that makes sense. The way we count from one and up to ten. There also wasn't year zero in Anno Domini era, so strictly speaking this interpretation is also true if we just count all the ten years along the way. Otherwise counting decades wouldn't add up to a current year.