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Thousand Days: Concept

Thousand Days: Concept

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.

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.

@strickinato
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I love this - and it's a big hit with everyone I share it with 🙌

@ploguus
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ploguus commented Mar 29, 2024

It's been tried -- https://web.archive.org/web/20180815023027/https://birthkay.com/ -- but didn't really take off. I like the idea, myself!

@mmoskowitz
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Hi! I already had a listing of notable people with Julian dates for their birthdays and a rough notability (as of 2015 or so) metric for my project julian-factors, so I quickly sorted it by thousand-day and put it in https://github.com/mmoskowitz/julian-factors/tree/master/temp . I hope you will forgive me for not using your datum, you will find your thousand-mates in 397.tsv.

@scruss
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scruss commented Apr 3, 2024

I hope you will forgive me for not using your datum, you will find your thousand-mates in 397.tsv.

Wow, thanks! There's only a 1 in 1000 chance we'd pick the same arbitrary datum

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