All the digits in 2008 are even, which won't happen again for a dozen years. Believe it or not, that sort of calendar stuff turns some people on. So it's good to keep a clear distinction between human-created systems and the actual patterns of nature, like the 17-year cicadas now ravaging the oaks in Cape Cod. Those pests deliberately use a prime-number cycle to breed, because predators can't reproduce in tune with them; no other numeral fits into their cycle.

When it comes to calendars, even our starting point at Year One is now known not to mark what it was meant to commemorate: the birth of Christ, which appears to have happened a few years earlier. Moreover, the world brims with other calendar systems in which, depending on whom you ask, it's actually the year 7517 (Byzantine), 5768 (Jewish), 2668 (Japanese), 1429 (Islamic) and so on.

Bestowing any inherent significance to any date is like declaring July 31 "Virus Awareness Week" and then fearing a pandemic as that date approaches. This is our own game, our own numbering system. No outside influence has relevance to it.

It might be interesting, however, to look at other numbering schemes - not diverse cultural or religious calendars, but ones that actually connect with events of nature.

The Babylonians, for example, perspicaciously noticed that eclipses repeated every 18 years and 11 1/3 days, and they called this interval a saros. It happens because of the remarkable fact that a trio of separate lunar cycles (like the full-moon-to-next-full-moon interval) all come together after one saros interval; the saros is the common denominator of all three. So here is a real interval: a tangible one invented by nature, with the dramatic consequence of producing total solar eclipses like the one coming up in Mongolia on August 1.

Radioisotope dating systems are another numbering scheme with a natural origin. Carbon-14, inhaled into our lungs with every breath, breaks down to a form of nitrogen at such a steady rate that it's used to date the age precisely of anything that was once alive, such as cotton from ancient clothing remnants. In 5,730 years exactly half a given sample has changed to nitrogen. This, for example, is how the Shroud of Turin controversy was finally, decisively settled, when the cloth was found to date from medieval times rather than being an invaluable religious relic two millennia old.

We could go on and on. There are short cycles like the sun's 11-year storm periodicity, with its powerful earthly influences of temperature changes, Gulf Stream shifts and aurora displays, and the much longer but more dramatic 13,000-year period in which the Earth's spin-axis points in opposite directions, creating major climatic upheavals. There's almost no end to the numbering systems, whether physical, natural, religious or arbitrary, that call out to be celebrated this or any other year.

In our Gregorian Calendar, the really dramatic dates lie, alas, behind us. We've recently had two palindromic years (where the numbers read the same backward and forwards) in 1991 and 2002, and there won't be another until 2112. We had the "upside-down" year of 1961. We had the big four-digit turnover from 1999 to 2000, the millennium change a year later and the shortest Roman numeral year of the past thousand years (MM, 2000).

What's ahead? We'd have to jump to other cultures, like the turnover of one of the Mayan Calendars in 2012, or our own "perfect vision" year of 2020. But either is a stretch compared with the snazzy calendar stuff of the last few decades.

We'll have to get our kicks somewhere else.