Relearning the days of the Week

Megs:

Wow, you're being really productive this summer. Yay, Work Ethic!! It's no wonder you got top student in, like, 75% (3/4) papers for Part II Pharm!!!

Just had to blurt that out to the universe :D *clapclapclap*

Since my holiday just consists of wandering around and eating, repeatedly, I'll just post about something frivolous that I came up with two days ago.

Once, quite a while back, I watched this TV game show in Taiwan where there featured a little boy who, upon given any date of any given year, could tell you what day of the week it was. And everybody said Wow! and OMG and all that sort of thing, and wondered how the hell he managed to memorise all the dates in the history of time, and their days.

I like scrolling through the calendar on my phone. In fact I love holding the the Up, or Down button and watching the weeks fly past, forward into 2014 or back to 2006, for no particular reason. There's something beautiful about time. No, scrap it, there is everything beautiful about time. I love Time traveler's themes, as found in Chrono Trigger, and the Time Traveler's Wife, etc etc. I think History is ugly and macabre, and grand and beautiful. I like marvelling at the fact that I've only been alive for 7522 days, and, hopefully, counting.

(Note: this is a pretty fun website. I came across it when I was trying to figure out the age difference between myself and someone I had a crush on a while ago. Not that it was a big difference, I was just curious, and anyway shut up:

Calculating the Duration between Two Dates)

ANYWAY, I started this blog post to announce that I worked out how the freaky talented kid boy did it. At the time I just thought it was because he was seriously smart, and maybe autistic. It actually doesn't require you to memorise all the dates to the days of the week there have ever been.

What you do is:

1. Work out what the first day of the year was (e.g, 1st of Jan 2011 this year was a Saturday).

2. Memorise this sequence: 1, 5, 5, 2, 7, 4, 2, 6, 3, 5, 3, 1.
This is the sequence of Dates in all the months (January, Febuary, March, etc) on which the first Saturday will land on. For example, the first Saturday of May will land on the 7th this year.

3. Then you can figure out all the Saturdays of the given week, by just adding 7 onto the given date in Step 2. (Ergo: Saturdays in Feb will land on the 5th, 12th, 19th, 26th.)

4. Then you can work out whatever the day of the week a given date is, by just counting from the closest Saturday.

Note that the sequence in #2 is also different, for every Leap Year. Uh... I'll memorise that later. Actually you can just subtract 1 for all the months after Feburary.

This is handy, if, say, you want to plan a party on a specific day but don't have a calendar nearby. You could use your phone, I guess. Note: I can't tell you what the day it was on, like, the 5th of August 1345. I have to know the date of 1/1/1345 to do that. But it doesn't matter. All of this is frivolous. You can probably whip out your phone and find the calendar app in the time it takes for me to process Step 2, but what the hey. It's entertaining.

Your birthday, incidentally, lands on a Monday this year. :D