kistaro

Happy birthday! You forgot that you can also buy things by yourself. :D (No, I really don't mind that it's taking a while. I just like teasing.)

I still don't feel like I should be as old as I am. I feel more like 15 than 20, and though I'm vaguely looking forward to having a nifty 21st birthday on February 21st, I don't even plan to drink very much or very often. I want to get completely and totally smashed once (and only once), just to get a sense of my tolerance and how horrible I'll feel afterwards. But I don't like the taste of alcohol, so I'm not worried about overdoing it very often.

Yeah, I should be asleep.

Happy Birthday! I'd always assumed that you were a mite bit older, but it's nice to be of legal age. It's been a long time since I thought back that far.

HB2U

Happy birthday!

Well, obviously you're a totally different person than you were before; you used to be an irresponsible fool, but that second marked your sudden total change of character. Why, you're so rational and logical now, you can put yourself at a massively increased risk of lung cancer.

Yay you! Hey, it may be an arbitrary and silly demarcation, but you can open your own bank account now and such -- so take the milestone with the joy it deserves. :)

... Oh, and register to vote. *twitches in Bush's general direction*

I already registered to vote a few months ago- I can do that at 17.5, I just can't use that registration until now. I'll also be voting against the Misourri amendment to ban gay marraige.

No, what I have to register for now is the draft. You can believe I have been working on my skills at creatively botching forms just enough that a computer can't read it but a human can, so it gets put into the bueraucracy on the "human entry" pile and, while I'll be registered as not being delinquent on filling it out, I still won't be in the system. I have other escapes as well, but paperwork is the first step...

Actually, orbits and years are not the same thing, close but if they were the same we would not need to have leap years. Years are integer multiples of days, which are not related to orbits at all. If you really want to measure your birth moment w.r.t. orbital position, it is a bit more complex. Probably the easiest thing to do is find out exactly when the vernal equinox is in the year of interest (the vernal equinox is at the same point in the orbit each year, except that it slowly precesses 360 degrees in about 25,000 years and other minor aberrations) and measure your lifetime from there (modulo some other correction factors). This actually tells you a time in the orbit from a position, the position in the orbit at that time varies each year, slightly, because of the moon's gravity, eccentricity of various things, and a whole bunch of stuff that takes hundreds of terms of trig functions to approximate close enough for government work.

So happy birth(+/-1)day