Earth’s average orbital speed is a mind-blowing 108,000 kilometers per hour — fast enough to travel one earth-diameter in just seven minutes or so. At that speed, surviving on this ball of rock for 46 years, as of today, means that I have traveled roughly 43 billion kilometers in my lifetime, just due to earth’s motion around the sun. Also, by the way, NO, I will not convert this speed, nor this distance, into those annoying non-metric units!
I started a personal tradition 43 years ago, on the day I turned three years old, of associating stars with my birthday. On that day, I looked up in the sky, and saw the three stars of Orion’s Belt: Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. Given that these three stars were bright, and formed a fairly straight line, and given that I was turning three that day, it seemed perfectly obvious that those three stars had been placed there, in the sky, specifically for me — and so, that day, I claimed them as my personal property. (No one has ever accused me of lacking ego, nor self-confidence.)
As a young child, the science that most fascinated me was astronomy. In more recent years, my interest in stars has become more focused on the geometrical figures called stars, or star polygons — and so, now, rather than looking for my birthday stars in the sky, I always use geometry to construct some star, or starlike pattern, based on the number of years I have survived, to date. This is the one for the number 46, my age as of today.
Something strange happened to me, once, on January 12, in a year in the early 1990s. Until that day, I knew of no one who shared the same birthday as myself. Then, that day, I happened to flip on my car radio, which was already tuned to a news/talk radio station. I was completely stunned by what happened next, for I had accidentally stumbled upon The Rush Limbaugh Show on his birthday — and mine. I learned this almost immediately, for one of Limbaugh’s callers said, right after I turned the radio on, “Hi, Rush! Happy birthday dittoes!”
Limbaugh laughed, and thanked the caller. I screamed, and then I yelled, “Noooooo! I can’t have the same birthday as Rush Limbaugh!” However, like it or not, I had to admit that this coincidence was, indeed, true. Also, since Limbaugh is older than I am, I also had to face up to the fact that he had this birthday first.
I wanted to have someone else to know I shared a birthday with — someone I could respect — so I did some research to find other people who also shared the same birthday as myself. In those days, of glacially-slow dial-up Internet with much, much less of value to be found there, this meant actually going to a physical library, looking in actual, bound-paper books (how primitive, right?), and spending a few hours to do what can now be done, with Google and Wikipedia, in seconds. I learned, in those hours, that I also share the birthday of January 12 with none other than John Hancock, the first person to sign the Declaration of Independence, according to the old-style system for the date of his birth. (The difference between old- and new-style dates is caused by the discrepancies between the Julian and Gregorian calendars.) Given that the primary author of that document was my all-time favorite president, Thomas Jefferson, that was something of which I could be proud.
In later years, I learned that Wikipedeans (a group to which I belong) have constructed pages there where anyone can quickly and easily learn with whom they share a birthday. The one for my birthday is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_12. By looking at the corresponding page for your own birthday, you, too, can find out whom you share a birthday. No matter what day that is, you’re quite likely to find, as I did, both people you like and dislike. After all, there are only 366 birthdays to go around, so sharing birthdays with famous (and infamous) people is inevitable for us all.
RobertLovesPi.net 