Let's Celebrate Captain Picard Day!

Hey, check this out. Apparently today is Captain Picard Day! I hope you remembered to send out your cards.

"Well, these are simply terrible. Counselor, are the children living aboard the Enterprise especially
stupid or is it possible that their minds have been damaged somehow by cosmic radiation?"

-Captain Picard, disappointed by children 

"Darmok and Jalad at your momma's house!"

-Jean-Luc Picard, master of diplomacy

So what the hell is Captain Picard Day? Well, it was introduced in season 7 of Star Trek TNG as a hilarious joke Riker and Troi play on the Captain, but has since become a for-real nerd holiday alongside Federation Day and May the Fourth Be With You. You can celebrate by making clay sculptures of Picard's head, drinking Earl Grey tea (hot), and talking out your differences with hostile aliens who speak only in obscure cultural references from their home world.

Ok, you probably don't spend a lot of time
wondering about stardates, but I bettcha
Commander Steve and Lt. Snornak do

But you're probably wondering how can we possibly know today is Captain Picard Day (you were wondering that, right?). After all, in the future we'll have abandoned our medieval Jesus-based calendar and moved on to the baffling and barely logical stardate system designed to compensate for the face-meltingly vast distances between stars and the timey-whimey wibbly wobbly consequences of traveling at warp speeds. Further complicating matters is the fact that no consistent explanation of how stardates work was ever offered. Can we even be sure that today is really the day? Nope, 'fraid not.

As much as I'd love to say that some industrious trekkies worked it out with math or that it supplanted some pagan holiday, the truth is that the date was just chosen by TNG's U.K. broadcaster as a great day for a trek-a-thon. Oh well, Happy Captain Picard Day!

"So if episode 23 took place on a Tuesday, then Riker's birthday must be stardate 12286.5.
We can then divide by  the distance between Earth and the Klingon home world
which gives us the answer to why I was 34 before I knew the touch of a woman."

-Mathematicians