Zipper de doo dah

Guess what, chaps? Today is the 96th anniversary of the zipper. For about twenty years around the turn of the twentieth century, a Swedish design engineer working in New Jersey was trying to perfect a fastening method that worked faster and more reliably than buttons and hooks and laces and all the other ways that people tried to keep their clothes together at the time.

His name was Gideon Sundback, and he fixed two rows of teeth on opposing cloth tapes, which interlocked by the mechanism of a central device that slid over them. In short, he designed a zipper. Of course, the word wasn't in use at the time--and wasn't until 1921, when B.F. Goodrich ordered up 170,000 of the things from Sundback's Hookless Fastener Company for its new line of rubber galoshes. Goodrich coined the trade name Zipper, either to indicate the speed with which you could get in and out of the boots, or to imitate the sound the fastener made when you, well, zipped it up.

The whole thing was a bit of a novelty, but over the next ten years, they were regarded as a trendy thing, and not necessarily in a good way. (In his dystopic science-fiction novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley held them up as an exemplar of what the brave new world was about. And it wasn't a world he held in great favor.) But eventually, they insinuated their way into the garment world, and they've been there, front and center, ever since.

But aside from the front of a few retro garments, these fasteners now maintain the modesty of trouser-wearers across the planet. And for that, Mr. Sundback, we offer you our thanks. After slyly checking that we're not at half-mast, that is.

Tell a great story...in Morse Code

Today is Tell a Great Story Day. It's also Samuel Morse's birthday. So here follows a great story, in Morse Code.

-- --- .-. ... . / .. -. ...- . -. - . -.. / - .... . / .. -. - . .-. -. . -

Got that, you Morse coders out there? For those of you who don't speak the language, that series of dots and dashes translates to "Morse invented the Internet."

Before you get all bent out of shape about the other Internet pioneers who have a better claim to being father of the Internet (y'know, people like Vannevar Bush, George Licklider, Al Gore, or the Webmeister himself, Tim Berners-Lee), consider the following:

Samuel Finley Breese Morse (April 27, 1791 – April 2, 1872) was, among other things, the inventor of the single-wire telegraph system. This network facilitated near-instantaneous communication across vast distances, using a medium of communication that had only two components: An on signal and an off signal. It was the original digital communication network. Today, using only on and off signals, the Internet transfers digital data across more robust networks and at vastly faster speeds, but using the same zeroes and ones Morse had to play with. 

Only later did analog telecommunications come along--in the form of voice telephony and then radio and television broadcasts. But that little revolution is fast becoming an aberration. Most phone calls--including all cell phone calls--convert voice data into digital packets that are only converted later into analog sounds. Television will soon be going digital too. Only radio is a pure frequency-modulated analog form now. 

So from here in dot-dash-dot-com land, we wish Samuel a very happy 218th birthday. Many happy ACKs of the day.

It's Nisan 14th...let's celebrate Easter!

Well, it's the second week in April, which means that we're counting down to Easter...at least, we are this year. Easter falls on April 12th in 2009, but last year it happened nearly two weeks earlier on 23rd March. In 2011, it will be almost two weeks later, on 24th April.

Why on earth is there such a huge spread of dates for Easter, do we hear you cry? We're glad you asked.

Obviously, Easter is a Christian holiday that celebrates the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. But the whole Easter story begins with Jesus and the disciples celebrating a Jewish holiday, Passover. The Last Supper was a seder, the traditional feast of Passover, which begins on the night of first full moon of Spring every year. In the Jewish calendar, which is based on phases of the moon, Passover always falls on the same date, Nisan 14th. And to early Jewish converts to Christianity, it made sense for Easter celebrations to start with the seder at Passover.

However, some other early Christians felt that Easter should always be celebrated on the same weekday every year--with the death of Jesus on a Friday and his resurrection on the following Sunday. Nisan 14th, Passover day, could fall on any day of the week, which they didn't like.

And so a great controversy began in the early church. When should Easter be celebrated? In the second century, the argument reached such a pitch, they threw syllables at it: It was given the grandiose name of the Quartodecimian Controversy. The quartodecimian bit comes from the latin word for 14, as in Nisan 14th.

Most of the quartodecimians—the Passover Easter folk—lived in Asia Minor. Most of the Easter weekend folk were Europeans. And both sides assumed the other had it wrong. So in the year 155, the Bishop of Smyrna visited the Pope to plead the case for a Passover-based Easter. Bishop Polycarp, who sounds more like a Pokemon to us than the Bishop of Smyrna, failed to persuade Pope Anicetus to change his Easter practices, but the Pope didn’t make the Quartodecimians change their practice either. So the eastern Orthodox churches just went ahead and did their own thing.

This didn't end the controversy, though. The nonstandard dating of Easter rankled with the church for nearly two more centuries. Eventually in 325, the members of the Council of Nicea convened to standardize the date of Easter. They came up with the compromise that we still use to date Easter: It falls on the first Sunday after the full moon after the vernal equinox. The nod towards the full moon was to please the Passover crowd: Nisan 14th, the date of Passover, always falls on a full moon. And the weekend bit was designed to please the mostly European folk.

Maybe the early churches were appeased by this compromisel, but it certainly confuses the rest of us. So for those of us without a lunar calendar to refer to, we here at Easterween hereby give you a table of the date of Easter Sunday for the next forty years. Here goes:

2010 - 4 April
2011 - 24 April
2012 - 8 April
2013 - 31 March
2014 - 20 April
2015 - 5 April
2016 - 27 March
2017 - 16 April
2018 - 1 April
2019 - 21 April
2020 - 12 April
2021 - 4 April
2022 - 17 April
2023 - 9 April
2024 - 31 March
2025 - 20 April
2026 - 5 April
2027 - 28 March
2028 - 16 April
2029 - 1 April
2030 - 21 April
2031 - 13 April
2032 - 28 March
2033 - 17 April
2034 - 9 April
2035 - 25 March
2036 - 13 April
2037 - 5 April
2038 - 25 April
2039 - 10 April
2040 - 1 April
2041 - 21 April
2042 - 6 April
2043 - 29 March
2044 - 17 April
2045 - 9 April
2046 - 25 March
2047 - 14 April
2048 - 5 April
2049 - 18 April

That should keep you covered. Print it out and take it with you. Keep it close to your heart. And most importantly: use it to calculate the midpoint between Easter and Halloween. That's the date we will be celebrating Easterween, and no matter what phase of the moon it falls on, it will be a heck of a celebration.