paul@moore.UUCP (Paul Maclauchlan) (02/02/89)
By popular request... ----------from the unix-unanimous archives------------------------ >From peter Wed Sep 21 16:32:23 1988 remote from ontmoh To: moore!unix-unanimous Subject: Re: Formula for UU Meeting Times -- the Secret Revealed. Date: Wed Sep 21 15:11:37 1988 Bruce Becker asks a question doubtless on the mind of multitudes: > I never can remember the formula for calculating meeting dates for > Unix Unanimous - could someone please refresh my memory? The following should provide an easy-to-remember answer: An Algorithm to Calculate Propitious Dates for Unix Unanimous Meetings. ====================================================================== We begin by recognizing the deep significance of the name Unix Unanimous, and the fact that Unix was developed at Bell Labs. A well known user input device (also developed at Bell, predating the mouse by decades) provides us with a natural encoding of our name, Unix Unanimous, resulting in 8649 862646687. (The skeptical reader may wish to verify this encoding by examining his/her very wide area sound network workstation.) Adding these two numbers together and taking the sum of the digits of the result we obtain the (somewhat reassuring) *answer* 42. At this point, we must give some deep thought to the question itself. One question might be: "which weeks of each month should Unix enthusiasts meet in Toronto (aka the meeting place)?" Working backward from the answer (42), and applying the reductionist device of "divide-and-conquer", we obtain "in the 4th and 2nd week of each month". Judicious evaluation of the relative merit of the respective meetings easily indicates that UU (first in importance) meets during the 4th week, 4 being the first digit in 42, and, by a process of elimination, the general UGC meeting is during the 2nd week. Having thus established the week, we now proceed to the determination of the day and hour. We naturally begin our search at the beginning. The beginning of the Unix Universe (aka the Epoch) was the beginning of Jan 1, 1970 GMT. Now, if we were SNA network administrators, we might conclude that we should hold our meetings at the stroke of midnight on a new Thursday. (SNA network admins don't usually have access to the Unix cal command, however one of their assistant administrators is sure to have a 1970 daytimer lying on his desktop.) But, as Unix system administrators we are aware that the Epoch *really* began at 19:00 on a Wednesday, at least in Toronto. (The details comprise an astronomically anaerobic reader exercise.) Thus, allowing for a 45 minute warm-up/settle-down startup period, we find that, naturally, UU meetings are at 18:15 on the 4th Wednesday of each month, while /usr/group/cdn general meetings are at 18:15, 2nd Wednesday each month. Q.E.D. -- Peter Renzland @ Ontario Ministry of Health 416/964-9141 peter@ontmoh.UUCP