Birthday

Had my birthday a few days ago (25th May), found out it was the same date as various other things. I turned 23, although I've not paid too much attention to birthdays for a year or so. Spent most of the day relaxing (finished coursework the other week and had no exams, so waiting to start my Masters thesis), although as I'd been doing that for a few days, I'm claiming the last week or so as an extended birthday relaxation fortnight. After the last summer, its nice to have an extended break (last summer I finished exams, started work the week after, finished work and started back at Uni after a weekend, so not too much time off). With good intentions I wrote down a short list of things I could try and get done, but so far have done about a fifth of them. 


Anyway, the main reason of this post is look at all the various other things that also happened on my birthday. 

Shared Birthdays
I share my birthday with a few other people, some I knew about already, some I learnt on the day. I already knew that I shared it with my mum [1], and found a few people I know from Uni were also celebrating. I also found out through twitter that it was also Mark Rosewater's (Head designer for Magic: The Gathering) birthday [2]. 


Geeky events
There are also some geeky days happening on May 25th (some more celebrated than others). One is the 'Glorious Revolution' memorial from Diskworld [3]. It is also 'Towel Day' in memory of Douglas Adams [4], and  one of two potential 'Star Wars days [5] ('May the fourth' being the other one) as it was the release date for the first film. All of these being on the same day have started a general 'Geek Pride Day' [6] which celebrates general geekyness. Before this year, I think I had only heard of towel day once or twice, but that was it. 


It was very strange to think that my birthday shared the day with so many awesome events, particualy ones relevant to me (been part of my Uni's Sci-Fi society for 5 years, being president twice and vice once). It could mean that that point in time inherently contains some sort of cosmic significance. Almost as if it were the temporal junction point for the entire space-time continuum. 


On the other hand, it could just be an amazing coincidence. [7]




[1] I keep telling her I was the best birthday present she ever got
[2] http://twitter.com/maro254/status/14695943907
[3] http://wiki.lspace.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution
[4] http://towelday.org/
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Day
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Pride_Day
[7] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096874/quotes?qt0426637