This Days Since Event calculator will determine how many days have passed since a known event. It even determines the right number of leap years for which we must add a day. It presents a period since some important event and measures that period in days.
Note that you can select other units for the output, showing the time since you were born, for instance, in numbers of seconds.
We all have a perception of the length of a day, how much we generally can accomplish in a day, how much we experience in a day. Our normal human pattern is closely marked by the passage of the Sun and the night. We live in days, forgetting the hours minutes and seconds. This equation can show you just how expansive your life has really been in the passage of time.
To use this equation you simply enter two dates: the current date and the date of some past event. If you don't remember the specific day of the month, use the 15th. Your total number of days will be reasonably close.
For both dates, the current date and the date of some event in the past, you enter the year as as an integer, you select the month from a pull-down list, and you enter the integer day of the month.
The equation takes care of the rest:
This calculator sums it all up so you can have a look into your past and get a sense of how long it has really been.
Note that you can change the time units of the output but because you did not enter a specific hour and minute the results viewed as minutes or seconds are essentially rounded to the day. The number of seconds since you were born is accurate to the day of your birth. For long periods of time it will give you a strong impression of how many times the clock hand has rotated.
Have you ever wondered how long it has been since you were born? I mean, have you ever stopped to think how many days, minutes and seconds have passed. Have you imagined how often you've awakened and grabbed a cup of coffee, taken a shower and looked out the window to see the blue sky (Sorry, only in Colorado do you regularly see a true blue sky almost every day).
Have you ever thought that your memory contains only a fleeting glimpse of the most important events in your life? When you try to recall the birth of a child or some other impactful, historic event in your life, if you are like the average person, you can really only recall glimpses of moments in your past. Glimpses of our lives in today's memory have been greatly modified by our minds with the passage of time. You have no "true" memories because they begin to morph from the very second you pass the event. Even the most important events of your life would not look like you remember them were you able to replay them in a video. It's just a fact of our nature. Our minds do not collect accurate information about our past.
But we mark those times as important days of our lives and the progression of sunrises and sunsets washes over us without a flicker of recognition of the passing years. Without those dots on the map of our lives, we would not have a past at all.
We live in the present. When someone tells you with a pumped-up sense of worth that they "only live in the present", they are trying to convey that they don't dwell on the problems of the past. And that is more true than they know. We only perceive the present and imagine the future. We have very little real memory of our past -- no matter how important, no matter how amazing, no matter how painful.
I have a better-than average human memory. When I wrote this calculator description, the days since my birth was reported by the calculator as 22,010 days or 528,240 hours or 31,694,400 minutes. 31 million times the minute hand has circled the clock face.
I would estimate that I can accurately recall maybe fifteen total minutes of my past with clarity, and even the memories I hold true and dear are likely to be changed by the plastic nature of my physical mind. I can remember the feel and light of the rooms in which my three sons were born, the heart monitor blipping, the placid attempt of the hospitals of the 90s to make the birthing room cozy. I can remember vaguely the impressions I had when my sons were cleaned off and presented back to us. I can remember that they wheeled my then wife in a chair to the entrance and it was a sunny Spring day outside.
If you believe you have clearer impressions than that of such important events, you are mistaken. Try discussing what was in the birthing room with your spouse or family member and see how many times they remember something you didn't recall at all. The color of the walls, the orientation of the window to the bed, curtains or blinds, the color of the hospital bed frame, the pattern on the blanket in which they wrapped your son.
I remember the first time I put on crampons at the base of the Athabasca Glacier and did a "tequila dance" on tiptoe before trying out my ice ax. I remember that I did that but can I replay it in my head and remember how many steps on tip toe I managed before losing my balance? No.
I am fortunate to remember a vague glimpse of a house in which we lived when I was two years old. The staircase and color of the walls, the location of the kitchen relative to the living room, the buttons on the window-mounted air conditioner in the detached garage, the row of flower that separated our yard from the neighbors.
I remember in that same second year lying on a bed with my mother next to me. I cannot picture her but I can feel her sitting next to me and her explaining what is that rainbow I can see through the window past the foot of my bed. But I have no remembrance of the color of those walls or whether the floor was wood or carpeted. Memory is a very inexact thing. Memories have a way of only capturing what was impressionistically important.
I remember the many times during my years in the Washington DC area when I bicycled to work from Great Falls down the towpath to Rosslyn. I spent hundreds of hours on that towpath with my thoughts and the passing impressions of the northern Virginia landscape. But can I remember even a fifty yard stretch of that path in any detail. I remember the sense of calm that comes on an dewy summer morning beneath the old growth trees on that path, the general impressions of marsh birds landing in the swampy confines in and around the old towpath. But I can't recall even five full seconds of a the true memory of riding on the worn towpath.
Memory fools us each and every day.
Is it all lost? Certainly not for those who can tell stories. Certainly not as we perceive we have lived a life. But details, even a smattering of details? not so much.
So, check out the span of you life in days and try to capture in your mind what the day was like when you read this Days Since Event calculator description, as I will try to capture a memory of the day as I write this.
It is a total blue sky day in early July of 2018, a Sunday and there is a usual light breeze blowing through the house as I have all the windows open. The aspen, from this vantage at my computer, are dancing next to the stone wall of the courtyard and dried Ponderosa needles are heaped against the base of the wall. The computer tells me its 87 degrees on Monument Hill but I am comfortable sitting here with no fan, no air conditioning, just a gentle, dry July breeze. Mynx is snoozing on the floor of the entrance-way, with the light of the skylight reflecting off the shiny wood surface all around her. It's a Sunday and I'm wrapping up another equation to do the math of our lives in vCalc.
As I spent the time to edit and rewrite a few puffy high clouds have blown into my view and I can see them just above the Gamble oak on the other side of the driveway. The trees still sway and the shadows of their leaves dance on the rock wall, and I ponder as usual what else I might accomplish today. My coffee has gone cold but the rich taste of the Reeses creamer remains regardless. My favorite red mug is the only thing between me and the monitor of the computer and the room is stacked with household items moved here while construction continues in other parts of the house.
It is a Sunday and maybe this written passage, a spilling of digital ink, will record enough that I can remember better the sight and sense of this day.
But I know not much will remain of the true memory of this hour in front of my computer. In the next minutes, the vision of the light on the aspen leaves will become something I can conjecture but not really remember. And I won't be able to truly picture just how many Ponderosa needles have accumulated next to the stone wall.
It's a shame because this day, like so many in Colorado is like a day on a vacation of my youth, with warm summer breezes enveloping you in gorgeous sunlight. and comfort, with simplicity in the plan of enjoying the day. It's a shame I cannot video-record every second.
To learn more about the brains ability to store memories, check out:
This calculation accurately represents the days of the Gregorian Calendar. If you know what the Gregorian Calendar is, try to remember who taught you that piece of relative trivia. It was probably something you learned in high school, in a general science class or a history class. The calendar you use everyday is the Gregorian Calendar. It has twelve months in a year and 365 days, except for leap years which have 366 days.
This Days Since Event calculation accurately reflects the number of days in the year including whether a calendar year is a leap year. It accurately reflects the number of days of each month of a year in the Gregorian calendar. Remember:
"Thirty days hath September, April,June and November. All the rest have thirty-one, except February which has twenty-eight and on leap years has twenty nine."
Leap years come and go and for the most part, unless your birthday falls on February 28th or 29th, most of us just ignore the leap year addition of an extra day to the second month. Leap years are necessary because the time it takes the Earth to rotate around the Sun is not exactly 365 days. And so we have to make up the difference with leap years.
The rules for which years are leap years are relatively simple:
That's it. That is the rules for which years get an extra day, February 29th. And those simple rules keep the calendar days accurate for millennia.
The more exact timing of the minutes and seconds that end a year precisely on the stroke of midnight are computed by the US government and seconds are added or subtracted at the end of a year to align the true midnight of December 31st with the passage of the Earth around the Sun. This adjustment is referred to as Leap Seconds. But this equation does not include that level of complexity and this equation will only be accurate to whole days and those whole days' hours and minutes and seconds.