(no subject)

I was amused that this year, Good Friday and Purim fell on the same day. But apparently, yesterday was extremely historic: Good Friday, Purim, Narouz (Persian New Year) and the Eid (birth of the Prophet, Muslim holiday) all fell between 3/20 and 3/21 this year.

Ed Reingold and Nachum Dershowitz, co-authors of the books Calendrical Calculations and Calendrical Tabulations, determined how often in the period between 1600 and 2400 A.D. Good Friday, Purim, Narouz and the Eid would occur in the same week. The answer is nine times in 800 years. Then they tackled the odds that they would converge on a two-day period. And the total is ... only once: tomorrow.

Wow.

Tribute to Arthur C. Clarke

I found this in my wanderings:

Some of the text is hard to read, so here are the quotes in order:

I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. ...I do not think we will have to wait for long.

We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return ... The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation ... the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began.

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

Two possibilities exist. Either we are alone in the Universe, or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.