Anniversary Annal

Anniversary Anna1 Digital Salon 5 Leonard0 30 School of Visual Arts 50 Jesus of Nazareth 2000 Computers date their files in the revised Gregorian calendar, whose primary unit of time is the year it takes the earth to revolve in its orbit around the sun, and whose starting point is the birth of Jesus. The lineage of this calendric system is European, and it comes as no surprise that silicon machines inherited timekeeping conventions from the culture of their inventors. Julius Caesar decreed in 46 B.C. (as that year is now popularly known) that the Roman calendar should be shifted from a lunar to a solar basis (the unit). In the early 6th century, Dionysius Exiguus inaugurated the Christian Era by setting the beginning of the calendar at the birth of Jesus [I]. But he was a little off when fixing that moment in time, which actually appears now to have been 4 B.C. instead. Jesus was born 2000 years ago this year [2]. However, computers don’t have to turn their 19s into 20s yet. By an inadvertent act of ecclesiastical grace, Dionysius Exiguus eased the daunting burden of software managers scrambling to update short-sighted programs to accommodate the years of the 21st century. Like paper forms that predated computers, the first two digits of a year in the current century were often hard-coded:,the place where the date goes being designated automatically as ‘‘19-something.” In some software, the year of the date is represented by only two digits. Programmers are now working feverishly to loosen the grip of this stubborn 19, but they can rejoice in the fact that long ago they were granted a deadline extension and have an extra few years to make the machines understand that a new century is dawning [3]. We give the numbers of time an arbitrary importance in our lives. Yet however arbitrary it may seem, that reverence often reflects a structural protocol or sacred observance. We think of history as meted out in decades stacked lo high to make a century. We celebrate powers of 10 as jewels of time whose midpoints are semi-precious events. The year is a natural unit of time with vital connections to our living environment. But why should lo of them be more significant than 11 or 12? The day is an equally natural unit of time, but we make a special fuss over 7 of them and divide their extent into 24 pieces subdivided again into 60. Days abhor tens. When I send people birthday cards, I sometimes use a ploy my brother taught me: writing the age in hexadecimal (base 16). The 50th birthday is a particularly good occasion for sending a card saying “Happy 32.” When the puzzled recipient protests, I explain that the number is written in hexadecimal notation: three 16s are 48, plus 2 makes >o. Why not celebrate your half-century by meditating on the image of yourself as 32? Put in perspective our society’s tenet that younger is better. This little exercise shows how much stock we place in numbers, but it also raises interesting questions about why we do it. What is so much more important about 50 than 48, which is 30 in hex? Forty in hexadecimal is 28. Thirty is IE. Whoops. Base 16 numbers require 16 symbols, and after we run out of the Arabic numerals, we use A, B, C, D, E, and F to stand respectively for what we call in the decimal system 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15. So 31 is IF and 32 is 20. If we used a different number base (as some cultures have), would the temporal milestones be different? The premium our culture places on youth in people is inverted when it comes to institutions, where the stability and reliability conveyed by longevity outweigh the exuberance and flexibility of newness. So for the opposite effect, I could write the age of the School of Visual A r t s as 62 in base 8. This doesn’t produce a very dramatic shift, but base 4 does the trick: 50 years becomes 302. And Leonardo’s 3 0 turns...