Blowing & Drifting

By predilection and by training, I love calculating “as far as” spans between two dates. It can be cheap history, but can also be useful to see how closely in time two events occurred, especially when one of those events seems “closer” to the present day.

Personal information is great for this:

• Julia is about as far from birth (6 years) as she is from finishing elementary school.
• Genevieve is about as far from birth (4 years) as she is from third grade.
• I am further away from graduating college (15 years) than both Julia and Genevieve are from starting college (12 and 14 years, respectively – assuming they start at age 18).
• I’m three times further now from finishing grad school (in 2003) than finishing college (1995) was from starting grad school (1997).

History is always full of these:

• We are almost four times further from the end of Reagan’s last term (1988, 22 years ago) than the start of his first term (1981) was from the end of the Vietnam War (1973, 8 years before).
• We are almost two and a half times further from the end of World War II (1945, 65 years ago) than the end of World War II was from the end of World War I (1918, 27 years before 1945)
• Pearl Harbor was almost as far ago from the present day (1941, 69 years) as it was from the end of the Civil War (1865, 76 years earlier).
• We are further from the end of the Great Depression (1941, 69 years) than the start of the Great Depression was from the start of the Long Depression with the Panic of 1873 (68 years).
• We are almost as far from the Spanish-American War (1898, 112 years) as that war was from the end of the Revolutionary War (1783, 115 years earlier).
• We are almost as far from the birth of the Model T automobile (1908, 102 years) as the first Model T was from the first functional locomotive (1804, 104 years earlier).

I’m not sure what to do with these kinds of facts, except maybe to ponder the passage of time, but they’re fun to think up.