Friday, November 11, 2011

Happy 11/11/11!

Allysen and I have been trying for a while to figure out how to celebrate 11/11/11. For about the last year, I've had a strange knack for glancing idly at a clock and discovering that the time was 11:11. (Again? This is weird.) I wasn't doing it intentionally at all, though after a while it became hard not to look at a clock and hope that it would be 11:11. Anyway, that gave me a special desire to celebrate November 11, 2011 (11/11/11), a truly cool date.

It turns out that where Allysen works, a lot of brainy, creative people had the same idea. She called me and said, "You have to come in and see it." I did. These people are amazing. They had decorative pillars arranged in pairs all over. They had placards spelling out 11.11.11 in a bunch of different languages, including binary and Morse code.

 11.11.11 in Korean
 
 11.11.11 in Urdu (I think)

  
11.11.11 in ???

They renamed all the floors.


Among the special elevenses in the world:
  • There have been 11 Doctor Whos.
  • There have been 11 Star Trek movies.
  • The Apollo 11 mission landed the first men on the Moon.
  • In M-theory, there are 11 spatial dimensions.
  • The sunspot cycle is 11 years.
  • There are 11 thumb keys on a bassoon. 
  • The sports soccer, football, cricket, and field hockey all field 11 players to a team. 


We're going to settle in for a movie and fish and chips, and plan on popping open a bottle of something fun at 11:11 p.m.

Happy 11/11/11, everybody!

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5 Comments:

At 12:37 AM, Anonymous Mike said...

The pic following "Urdu" (which looks like Arabic to me) is either Russian or Bulgarian. I do a lot of work with international versioning of Film & TV and still cannot tell them apart.

 
At 2:29 AM, Blogger Jeffrey A. Carver said...

Thanks. I thought it might be Russian, but that was a completely uneducated guess. Nice to know it's hard to be sure even for a pro!

 
At 9:46 AM, Anonymous Amr said...

Urdu and Farsi both use a modified Arabic alphabet, which is why it looks like Arabic. Those are not the Arabic word for eleven, though, so I assume it is either Urdu or Farsi.

 
At 4:27 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I cheated. I used Google Translate.

However, before doing so, I made the semi-educated guess that the second one was Persian (Farsi) and the third one was Serbian. [I realized that the third one couldn't be Russian or Bulgarian: neither of them use a "j" character in their Cyrillic, but Serbian does.]

The Google check confirmed that the second script was indeed Urdu, but the third was Serbian. So I'm at least half right. :-)

 
At 12:23 AM, Anonymous Mike said...

Ah HA! I'm totally making a note of the "j" use in Serbian Cyrillic! Thanks duncanmac, you might have just helped me earn a chunk of paycheck.

And to think I was mister-know-it-all enough to not run that through Google translate... I have humbly been taken to school.

Thanks!

 

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