Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

Everybody seems to be talking about the moment, this coming Friday the Thirteenth, when the Unix epoch rolls over to 1234567890. (This represents, more or less, the number of seconds elapsed since the beginning of 1 January 1970. If you are a nitpicker, you may want to read up on this.)

I found this faintly disturbing. Seems like Unix is a creature of the binary world, so shouldn't we be looking at the epoch in binary, or octal, or hexadecimal?

I asked Google to calculate: "1,234,567,890 in hexadecimal"

The reply:

1 234 567 890 = 0x499602D2

If you prefer, in binary:

1 234 567 890 = 0b1001001100101100000001011010010

Okay, so is there any upcoming moment that makes an interesting-looking hexadecimal number?

One leaps out: As many zeroes as possible in the near future. Namely, 0x50000000. If you really
love zeroes, you'll want to express this as 0b1010000000000000000000000000000.

What's the decimal equivalent of this?

0x50000000 = 1 342 177 280

This is 107,609,390 seconds after next Friday. There are thirty-some million seconds in a year, so the date is about three years away.

A helpful conversion site informs me that this is:

GMT: Fri, 13 Jul 2012 11:01:20 GMT

(Nitpickers will want to adjust for leap seconds.)

It turns out to be ANOTHER Friday the Thirteenth. Spooky, no?

So after you've enjoyed seeing 1234567890 come up on the decimal epoch clock this Friday, start planning your Septuple-Zero (Hex) parties for the eve of Bastille Day, 2012.