Thousand Days: Concept

reference copy: Thousand Days: Concept on github.

Stewart Russell – scruss.com — 2024-03-26, at age 19999 days …

Summary

One’s thousand day(s) celebration occurs every thousand days of a person’s life. They are meant to be a recognition of getting this far, and are celebrated at the person’s own discretion.

Who is this for?

  • Maybe your birthday’s on a day associated with an unpleasant event. Your thousand day will never coincide with your birthday.
  • Maybe your birthday’s in the middle of winter, or in another part of the year that you’re not keen on. Your thousand day is every 2 years and 3 seasons, so it shifts back by a season every time it happens.

Quantities and scale

1000 days is approximately:

  • 2.738 years
  • 2 years 269 days
  • 2 years 8.85 months
  • 2 years, 3 seasons.

4000 days is just shy of 11 years.

Disadvantages

Compared to regular birthdays, thousand days:

  • must be calculated; they’re not intuitive when they’re going to happen. But we have computers and calendar reminders for that …
  • can be used to work out your actual date of birth, if someone knows that you’re going to be x000 days old on a particular day. It’s possible to know someone’s birthday, but not know their age.

Implementations

Web

My ancient Your 1000 Day Birthday Calculator, first published in 2002 and untouched since 2010.

Shell

So it turns out that GNU date can handle arbitrary date maths quite well. For example:

date --iso-8601=date --date="1996-11-09 + 10000 days"

returns 2024-03-27.

Other Ways

Excel or any other spreadsheet will do, too. Although not for too many years back

People with the same thousand day as you

This is an idea for finding people who have a thousand day on the same day as you. I suggest using 1851-10-01 as a datum, because:

  • nothing particularly interesting happened that day;
  • it’s conveniently 43000 days before my birthday.

then calculate

( (birth_date - 1851-10-01) mod 1000 ) + 1

This results in a number 1 – 1000. Everyone with the same number shares a 1000 day birthday with you.

Why not 0 – 999?

  1. No-one deserves to be a zero;
  2. Wouldn’t be much of a thousand day if it only went up to 999, would it?

Incomplete list of people with day = 1

There are more, but these were found from Wikipedia’s year pages

Licence

🅭 2024, Stewart Russell, scruss.com

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

There are no trademarks, patents, official websites, social media or official anythings attached to this concept. Please take the idea and do good with it.

So why aren’t you implementing this further?

I’ve had this idea kicking around my head for at least the last 20 years. For $REASONS, it turns out I’m not very good at implementing stuff. I’d far rather someone else took this idea and ran with it than let it sit undeveloped.

Harvey, Arnie and me

I have little in common with Messrs. Keitel and Schwarzenegger — except that we’re all an exact number of thousands of days old today.  So that means I’m still messing around with the 1000 Day Birthday Calculator concept. I scraped Wikipedia’s dates entries, did some classy modulo arithmetic, and (give or take some Julian/Gregorian calendar changes, which I didn’t) it’s also the following folks’ birthdays: Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg (1599), Ottavio Piccolomini (1599), Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608), Christian Goldbach (1690), Theophilus Cibber (1703), Franz Moritz Graf von Lacy (1725), Gilbert Stuart (1755), Mirza Ghalib (1796), Peter Ernst von Lasaulx (1805), Albéric Magnard (1865), Carl Nielsen (1865), Princess Henriette, Duchess of Vendôme and Alençon (1870), Lee DeForest (1873), Maximilian von Weichs (1881), Olev Siinmaa (1881), Sara Teasdale (1884), Geoffrey Fisher (1887), León de Greiff (1895), Walter O’Malley (1903), Arsenio Lacson (1911), Jean Ritchie (1922), Lucian Freud (1922), Bengt Lindström (1925), Hank Thompson (music) (1925), Shoista Mullodzhanova (1925), Agnès Varda (1928), Pro Hart (1928), Dominic Chianese (1931), Harvey Keitel (1939), Hildrun Claus (1939), James Loewen (1942), Sarah Brady (1942), Keith Emerson (1944), Patrice Chéreau (1944), Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947), Jonathan Mann (1947), William Atherton (1947), Peter Jurasik (1950), Steve Ferrone (1950), Desi Arnaz, Jr. (1953), Linda Hayden (1953), Richard Legendre (1953), Tonya Lee Williams (1958), Pascal Olmeta (1961), Thurl Bailey (1961), Pernell Whitaker (1964), Ginger Fish (1966), Maria Canals Barrera (1966), Puri Jagannadh (1966), Sissel Kyrkjebø (1969), Alexander Kapranos (1972), Matt Belisle (1980), Ashley Hansen (1983), Chris Roberson (American football) (1983), Sarah Poewe (1983), Alison Pill (1985), Klara Ósk Elíasdóttir (1985) and Mara Lopez (1991).

If I’d had any free time, I would’ve had a web app for you to work out who shares a 1000 day birthday with you. But if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a whole day to be 15000 …

Today, I am 13000

Yup, 13000 days old today, according to my mildly-amazing 1000 Day Birthday Calculator. I don’t know where I got the idea for this, but it was back in my undergrad days, certainly before I hit my 10000s.

As there aren’t any birthday cards for these celebrations yet, I’ll just have to make my own. Happy Birthday To Me! Just don’t call me leooo …

welcome baby emma

To Katie & Joe Raine in St Louis, baby Emma is born today. She shares her birthday with her Aunt Catherine.

happy birthday to, erm, me

Jings, 12418 days old today.

Through the wonders of gift exchange (where geographically diverse families agree to spend an amount on each other, then buy something for that value; saves mailing stuff) I got a used but gorgeous Zero 2000 camera, all teak and brass, from my sister and my parents. I took this with it:

Light Streaming through Leaves
(image links to a larger version at photosig.com).

And now, to a birthday breakfast …