Sunday's date is a rare palindrome that hasn't happened in over 900 years

Sunday is shaping up to be a unique day for reasons other than the Super Bowl and Groundhog Day: It's also a rare palindrome.

While various forms of palindrome dates are fairly common, 02/02/2020 has the unique distinction of reading the same backward and forward when written out in eight digits in multiple date systems, according to University of Portland professor Aziz Inan.

“We are so lucky to have such a special palindrome date occurring in our lifetime because it’s so rare,” Inan told USA TODAY Saturday.

For starters, it's an eight-digit palindrome: 02022020. Many palindrome dates are only symmetrical if you write the date with seven digits (1-10-2011) — or in some cases even fewer (9-10-19).

But even more rare, according to Inan, is that Sunday's date is an international palindrome: It works whether you write the date as "Month/Day/Year" or "Day/Month/Year," as many countries do.

Inan calls such dates "ubiquitous palindromes," and there won't be another one for 101 years. After that, you'll have to wait until March 3, 3030.

According to Inan's calculations, the last such palindrome date to occur was 11/11/1111 – more than 900 years ago.

For years, Inan has been crunching numbers using a basic calculator and a pad of paper to find unique patterns  in dates.

“I advocate for these things because they’re so valuable for STEM education,” he said.

It's an accessible kind of puzzle that he has used to engage students and get people talking about math.

And Inan sees puzzle everywhere – dates that form square roots (3/3/9), dates that make sequential numbers (11/12/13) and even his own name (if you write it in all caps, switch the vowels in "AZIZ" and rotate the Z's to make N's – "AZIZ" becomes "INAN").

(Source: USA Today)

Coronavirus: China accuses US of causing panic and 'spreading fear'

The Chinese government has accused the US of causing "panic" in its response to the deadly coronavirus outbreak.

It follows the US decision to declare a public health emergency and deny entry to foreign nationals who had visited China in the past two weeks.

There are more than 17,000 confirmed cases of the virus in China. Some 361 people have died there.

Outside China, there are more than 150 confirmed cases of the virus - and one death, in the Philippines.

The virus causes severe acute respiratory infection and symptoms seem to start with a fever, followed by a dry cough.

On Monday, a study by a Chinese virologist said a pneumonia outbreak associated with the coronavirus had likely started in bats.

The outbreak took its toll on Chinese shares when markets reopened on Monday following the Lunar New Year holiday. 

The Shanghai Composite index closed nearly 8% lower, its biggest daily drop for more than four years.

What measures has the US taken?

On 23 January, the US ordered the departure of all non-emergency US personnel and their family members from the city of Wuhan in Hubei province, where the virus originated.

Less than a week later, the US allowed for the voluntary departure of non-emergency personnel and relatives of US government employees from China.

On 30 January, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency over the new virus.

Following this, the US ordered the departure of all US personnel family members under the age of 21 in China.

Any US citizen who has been in Hubei province will be subject to 14 days' quarantine upon returning to the US.

What are other countries doing to stem the outbreak?

On Monday, Hong Kong said it was suspending from midnight local time (16:00 GMT) 10 out of 13 border crossings with mainland China.

Various countries have imposed varying travel restrictions and other preventative measures, including:

• Denying entry to all foreign visitors who have recently been to China: US, Australia, Singapore
• Denying entry to foreigners travelling from mainland China: New Zealand, Israel. (Russia will also apply these restrictions, though not through Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport)
• Denying entry to foreigners who have visited Hubei province: Japan, South Korea
• Temporarily suspending all flights to mainland China: Egypt, Finland, Indonesia, the UK, Italy
• Closing the border with China: Mongolia, Russia (partially)

How did China react to the US measures?

In a news briefing on Monday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said the US actions "could only create and spread fear" instead of offering assistance.

She said the US was the first country to impose a travel ban on Chinese travellers and the first to suggest a partial withdrawal of its embassy staff.

"It is precisely developed countries like the US with strong epidemic prevention capabilities... that have taken the lead in imposing excessive restrictions contrary to WHO recommendations," Ms Hua said, according to a Reuters report.

Do the travel bans work?

Global health officials have advised against the bans.

The WHO has warned that closing borders could even accelerate the spread of the virus, if travellers enter countries unofficially.

"Travel restrictions can cause more harm than good by hindering info-sharing, medical supply chains and harming economies," the head of the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said last week.

The WHO instead recommends introducing screening at border crossings.

On Monday, Dr Tedros again praised China for its commitment to fighting the coronavirus, stressing that the only way to defeat it was for all countries to work together "in a spirit of co-operation".

How deadly is the virus?

More than 75,000 people may have been infected in the city of Wuhan, experts say.

But estimates by the University of Hong Kong suggest the total number of cases could be far higher than the official figures.

A report on the early stages of the outbreak by the Lancet medical journal said most patients who died from the virus had pre-existing conditions.

The report found that, of the first 99 patients treated at the Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, 40 had a weak heart or damaged blood vessels. A further 12 had diabetes.

Most people infected are likely to fully recover - just as they would from a normal flu.

An expert at China's National Health Commission (NHC) said that one week was sufficient for a recovery from mild coronavirus symptoms.

(Source: BBC)

The phone call

After driving fifty miles on US 380 to McKinney, I take I-75 south toward the Ridgeview exit. I’m on my way to the cemetery, silk red roses in the passenger seat. In three days, it will be three years since my phone rang at nine twenty on a Saturday morning. My mother, telling me my father was gone.

I take a right toward the cemetery and follow the winding path to the tree. I park beside it.

As the first anniversary of my father’s death approached, my mother asked me to put roses on his grave: “I want him to have them for the day.” She wasn’t well enough to do it herself—the cancer, diagnosed not long after his death, had taken its last turn, though we didn’t know it then. When she died, fourteen months after my father, I swiped through the photos on her phone and found his grave, its mound of funeral flowers. He was buried on the first of February, and the dates on the photographs showed she had driven the hour there on the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth. Disbelief, I imagine, and the need to convince herself it was true.

My father died in the hotel room where my parents were staying in McKinney, Texas. A heart attack at eighty-three. He was gone before my mother could get to the phone. He was gone when the paramedics asked him his name. He was gone when the ambulance rushed away, my mother following in their car to the emergency room.

On the second anniversary of my father’s death, last year, my sixteen-year-old daughter, Indie, and I were at my parent’s house for the final time, packing boxes, going through drawers and closets, watching movers load the furniture we wanted before the estate sale. The day came and went.

I cross the grass to the headstone, the one my parents share. This is the first anniversary I have had the chance to really remember—the daze of a drive Indie and I made on 380 East that Saturday morning, the corners we turned in the ER until we found my mother in the doorway watching for us, my father’s body in the room behind her. I kneel down and press my fingertips to the date: January 28, 2017.

Indie’s at work today, so she’ll come to the cemetery by herself tomorrow. I will not write her grief here, only mine.

My father would—get a paper plate and fill it with Nilla wafers, then grab a knife and spread peanut butter on each one; race popsicle sticks with me in the rush of water along the curb after it rained; play his Jerry Lee Lewis albums loud enough to hear while he was in shower; spin our orange VW bug in the mall parking lot when it snowed (“Don’t tell your mother”); recount the entire plot of the movie he had gone to see by himself; prop his feet on the rubber rails of escalators as we descended, one foot on each side; call me whenever Titanic was on TV; follow me to my car every time I left to go back to college to tell me, “Remember why you’re there”; write me letters on yellow legal-pad pages; drive me to downtown Dallas and walk the 5K route while I ran; ask the piano player in Nordstrom to play “La Vie en Rose”; order a waffle, crisp, bacon, crisp; swim laps at dusk while Indie swam beside him.

Every time I visit the cemetery, I talk to my parents. I look at the tree, and I tell them things. But today, after I remove the poinsettias and walk them down to the dumpster, after I set the roses in the vase and arrange them until I can hear my mother saying, “Pretty,” I stand silent. I think about next year when Indie will be at college, and how, then, everyone will be gone.

I won’t mind being alone. I’ve always felt most myself when I’m by myself, but still, Indie will go in seven months, and her leaving will be another loss in a litany of losses. All of them, one after another. The soon of Indie’s leaving trembles like a last train car.

Across the way, a tractor bounces over the grass to dig a new grave.

Three days from now, on January 28, I will wake while it’s still dark, unable to sleep while the rain slows. I’ll turn over and back again, throwing back the covers, feeling dread. Later, I will sit with Indie at the kitchen table and tell her, “It’s as if I woke up and felt that phone call coming again.” And I will glance at the chair where my father always sat when I say, “The body has a memory.” Indie will nod, tell me she woke up in a cold sweat.

I will not tell her that after I left the cemetery, I drove to the Holiday Inn and Suites on I-75. Or that I pulled into the parking lot and drove around the four-story building and figured out there’s only one entrance to the hotel. Or that I parked, one of a few cars in the lot, and looked in every direction, wondering which one my father took on his last walk. I do not tell her how I stared at the automatic double doors of the entrance.

Instead, I will tell her about the popsicle sticks, the way Dad would count to three before we let them go, the way he ran alongside his stick, shouting, “Come on, my guy! Come on, my guy!” The way I laughed and ran with him.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Literary paper dolls: Sula

When I was a girl, I had a friend.

Some years I used honorifics and some years she was my only friend and there was no need. There was a high school classmate of ours who, for a while, thought we were the same person, and there was another who thought we were lovers. I’ve told the story of the end of that friendship so many times that it has almost lost meaning. At first, telling the story stretched out all the space between us that hadn’t been there before. Then, it just began to collapse it.

One time, our senior year, I told the story to another girl in the winter darkness of my suburban street. Her car was sporty. The parking brake was a pedal by her feet. When I told the story she lifted one long leg and smashed that parking break to the floor.

The parking brake and the totality of being a teenager made me think it was a good story—a high school band put it in a song. From time to time, in the fifteen or so years since, I’ve taken that story out again and held it up to the light. Frances Ha appeared on the scene, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, Lady Bird, Conversations with Friends, all stories about female friendship and its fucking sharp points. I recognized elements of myself in each of them, and it quieted all that teenage rage. I was not the only girl to have her heart broken by her best friend. But I hadn’t yet read Sula.

Toni Morrison is a writer who doesn’t write to teach a lesson, as she has said, but Sula taught me one anyway. Sula seems to be about dependence: womanhood’s dependence on motherhood, a mother’s dependence on her children, a woman on her lover’s attention. But it also about the way a friendship—a very close one—is a relationship built out of desire, independent from all rules.

The novel blooms and blooms: the grandmothers behind the two mothers behind their daughters. It’s the story of life in one black neighborhood, the Bottom, in rural Ohio from 1895 to 1965. In 1922, Sula and Nel find each other: “Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on.” One day, a game they are playing leaves a boy drowned in the river. The secret, held in the sanctity of friendship, becomes part of their inseparable bond. When the girls grow up, Nel marries and Sula leaves town for college and whatever else she can find. “Had she paints or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendously curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and reoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. Like any artist without no art form, she became dangerous.” Nel, meanwhile, settles into the expectation of the town. 

Unfulfilled and fabulous, Sula returns. She arrives arranged in a sophisticated traveling costume the likes of which the town has never seen. She retires, eventually, to a plain yellow dress but the point is made. Sula has journeyed beyond the Bottom and this new version of her has no use for the town’s careful social codes. The rumors swirl, about how she is never ill, about how she comes to church without underwear.

She returns for Nel, but the arithmetic of best-friendship comes out wrong. “She had clung to Nel as both the self and the other only to discover that she and Nel were not one and the same thing.”  Sula learns her terrible lesson two ways: first, she sleeps with Nel’s husband, thinking their friendship is stronger than her curiosity. It isn’t. Then, alone for perhaps the first time, she develops an attachment to a man who wants none. This final break doesn’t kill her, but something does. She is dead—less than four pages later.

Perhaps she was dead to Nel and could therefore live no longer. Perhaps there is a tiny sliver of bitter revenge in Sula’s death. Or perhaps she has to die for Nel to realize the truth about friendship. To learn the lesson that the impossible female friend will always be held in the impossible balance. Only on her deathbed can Sula speak with full honesty: “If we were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it?” It takes Nel twenty-five years, but she finally hears Sula—hears her loud and clear and wonders, really wonders, what the answer is.

If friendship is all we say it is, if friendship in girlhood is the mingling of two souls, companionship that no adult, no lover, can ever match, then how can any transgression be unforgivable? Why isn’t the friendship sovereign over all possible faults? All these years later, I’m still wondering, “How come I couldn’t get over it?”

*

The purple dress:

On a particularly fateful day in her twelfth year, Sula wears a purple and white dress with a belt. Later in the book, the grammar of memory gets confused, the words mingle and redistribute, and it is as if Nel were the one wearing the dress, “Standing on the riverbank in a purple-and-white dress, Sula swinging Chicken Little around.”

The return:

Sula’s return to the Bottom after her time away is one of literature’s most stylish entrances. “She was dressed in a manner that was as close to a movie star as anyone would ever see. A black crepe dress splashed with pink and yellow zinnias, foxtails, a black felt that with the veil of net lowered over one eye.”

The red leather case:

Morrison carefully catalogues each item Sula has with her when she arrives back in town, including “a red leather traveling case, so small, so charming—no one has seen anything like it ever before, including the mayor’s wife and the music teacher, both of whom had been to Rome.”

The yellow dress:

Within just a few days of returning, Sula has settled into “wearing a plain yellow dress the same way her mother, Hannah, had worn those too-big house dresses—with a distance, an absence of a relationship to clothes which emphasized everything the fabric covered.” There is an easy dichotomy to draw between women who want attire to complement their figures and women who want their figures to defy their clothing. When rumors begin to circulate that Sula wears no underwear to church, it is inevitable. No apparel can contain her body.

The foxtails:

Just as my friend and I were beginning to drift apart, I arrived late at a party where she had been for some time. Knowing the host well, I let myself in and went to hang my coat. There were a variety of other coats already, many I knew well, the gathering was small, the guests were intimates. And yet there on the pegs was a coat I didn’t recognize. It was casually lavish, I remember it being furred, though maybe it wasn’t. I remember it being dark. It had to be my friend’s coat, and yet it was a piece of her I didn’t know.

(Source: The Paris Review)

I’m almost 50 and full of regret it’s too late to have children

It sounds like a midlife crisis so visit your GP and focus on what you’ve achieved – not what you haven’t, says Mariella Frostrup

The dilemma I’m a 49-year-old woman. I work hard, own a home and live a fairly good life. My problem is that I can’t help but feel regretful that I never had children. I can’t quite believe this is how my life turned out. When I was younger I ached for my own child.

I have a partner currently. We don’t live together, he’s younger than I am and quite possibly the loveliest man I’ve been in a relationship with. It’s too late for me to conceive now and IVF isn’t an option as we don’t have the money. He says he doesn’t care, but he dotes on friends’ children and I fear that when he’s older he’ll feel regretful, too.

In previous relationships I’ve had two abortions and two miscarriages and I’m not sure I ever recovered emotionally. I somehow got my life back on track, though I suffered another miscarriage along the way. Those losses left me feeling numb and I pretend to others who ask that I made positive choices. I feel ashamed, guilty and cowardly.

I want to know how to get through these next few years unscathed. I’m too serious, anxious about money, the environment, everything. I suppose I am a typical spinster cat-woman. I fear the emotional wrecking ball of the menopause and want to move on and to not think about what could have been – but it’s getting worse, not better.

‘I fear the emotional wrecking ball of the menopause and want to move on.’ Photograph: Getty Images

Mariella replies Don’t panic! It sounds like you are living through a full-blown midlife crisis. No one wants to think they are just a number, but sometimes it’s easier to navigate life’s difficulties when you know you’ve got company – and companions with similar concerns are one thing you won’t be short of as you hit 50, brimful of anxiety, regrets and melancholy. There’s no shame in seeking help and the best place to start is with your local GP, provided they have menopause experience, so they can sort hormonal bedlam from mental wear and tear.

You’ve reached the first age of reckoning and you’d be one in a million if there weren’t plenty of choices you’d love to rethink with the benefit of hindsight. I’m afraid that has to stop. There is no gain and a lot to lose in looking over your shoulder instead of keeping your gaze firmly forward-facing. The past is a place to mine for happy memories, not dwell on for those that are less so. It’s easier said than done, but it’s definitely possible. Dwelling on the many things I could have done better, some major, some minor, would definitely flatten me.

Write a list of amazing things you can do and start to tick them off

I’ve front-loaded on the negativity because, quite honestly, the future is far brighter than you envisage. I understand your regrets about not having children and agree the likelihood of getting pregnant now is extremely slim. You can sit around and mourn or consider the surfeit of opportunities offered by not being responsible for anyone but yourself. Whether it’s relocation or re-education, your bucket list is far more achievable than if you were a parent saddled with the cost of an umbilical connection you can’t shake off.

A close friend, like you, wanted children, but didn’t have them. Quite honestly, it’s her unfettered lifestyle I envy most when my teenagers make Harry Enfield’s best caricature of adolescent angst seem normal! Instead of rueing your misfortune, write a list of all the amazing things you can do now you’re mature and solvent, grab your younger man and start ticking them off.

What’s predictably human is that despite the much longer list of achievements you have to celebrate – a good job, trophy boyfriend, decent lifestyle, own home – you’ve zoomed in on the one ambition you have not succeeded with. They are not minor details to be shunted aside, but amount to the very things that most kids hope one day to achieve.

If, despite all my encouragement to count your blessings, you still feel your life requires a child, then there are around 6,000 children a year desperate for a secure home, and nearly 50% of them are school-age siblings, which means in adopting them you’d have a ready-made family. Bearing your own biological baby may be a natural impulse, but the enormous gift you can give a child who needs parenting is well worth considering, and not as a second choice. It sounds to me like you tick all the boxes for an acceptable adoption prospect so a life with children to rear and rage at you is in reach (contact gov.uk/child-adoption).

Whatever you choose, the life lesson remains the same. From now on it’s imperative to be grateful for what you’ve got, not preoccupied by what you haven’t. And finally, the menopause… well that’s a whole other conversation, but a good place to begin is on BBC iPlayer with my documentary The Truth About the Menopause. Reaching midlife is a time for contemplation, but also for positive action. With half your life left to live there are options aplenty and inspiring ways to move forward. You just need to review your perspective.

(Source: The Guardian)