Today is 02/02/2020 -- the First Global Palindrome Day in 909 Years (cnn.com) 84
An anonymous reader quotes CNN:
Today is a very special occasion -- the date is a palindrome, meaning it is the same when read forwards and backwards.
It is February 2, 2020, or 02/02/2020, in both the MM/DD/YYYY format and the DD/MM/YYYY format. At just after 2 a.m., it was 02:02:20 on 02/02/2020.
This is the only time such a date will occur this century.
The previous palindrome date in all formats came 909 years ago on 11/11/1111. The next will come in 101 years on 12/12/2121 and after that there will not be another until 03/03/3030.
It is February 2, 2020, or 02/02/2020, in both the MM/DD/YYYY format and the DD/MM/YYYY format. At just after 2 a.m., it was 02:02:20 on 02/02/2020.
This is the only time such a date will occur this century.
The previous palindrome date in all formats came 909 years ago on 11/11/1111. The next will come in 101 years on 12/12/2121 and after that there will not be another until 03/03/3030.
Wow (Score:1)
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Even crazier, tomorrow is the day after the first palindrome day in 909 years.
No, it's 2020-02-02 (Score:5, Insightful)
That's how you should see it - yyyy-MM-dd, which is a text sortable format.
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--
Who ordered that?
Signature is appropriate.
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That only makes sense if you cater to machines first and humans second. The important information for most humans will be the day, not the year, therefore it should go first.
Re: No, it's 2020-02-02 (Score:3)
He says on a US based website (M/D/YY). The problem is that humans can't seem to decide which of them is second class. We all agree on the machine version so why not just stick with that.
Re:No, it's 2020-02-02 (Score:4, Informative)
That's why MM/DD/YYYY is the worst possible format.
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That's why MM/DD/YYYY is the worst possible format.
I imagine it's simply the numerical equivalent of the text version: Month Day, Year (eg: February 2, 2020) -- both horrible for sorting.
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That's why MM/DD/YYYY is the worst possible format.
No mods - But I second that!
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Well, maybe there is one format that is worse: MM/DD/YY
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Touché - forgot about that one
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That only makes sense if you cater to machines first and humans second. The important information for most humans will be the day, not the year
No it isn't. I can remember that the Battle of Hastings was in 1066 and that Hitler was born in 1889, but I can't remember the days. Whoops, I said "Hitler", sorry.
Anyway, putting things as yyy/mm/dd does cater for humans, because, as the GP said, it puts the files in date order, and I've become used to it; it's just that most people are not used to it..
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Anyway, putting things as yyy/mm/dd does cater for humans, because, as the GP said, it puts the files in date order, and I've become used to it; it's just that most people are not used to it..
People SHOULD get used to it, because it's the only unambiguous all-numeric date representation. MM/DD/YY is standard in the States and, I'm ashamed to say, pretty common here in Canada. But in other parts of the world, DD/MM/YY is the common standard. Depending on the specific date, it can be impossible to determine what the intended date was. But there is zero ambiguity in YYYY/MM/DD, so in fact it is the BEST choice if we want to "cater for humans" and it really should be universally adopted.
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>"But there is zero ambiguity in YYYY/MM/DD, so in fact it is the BEST choice if we want to "cater for humans" and it really should be universally adopted."
+1
This is why I have been pushing for people to use ISO dates instead. They are unambiguous, logical, and sort correctly. And it also makes sense when you add time to it, which is also big-endian. December 25, 2020, 5pm, 5 minutes after, and 20 seconds:
2020-12-25-17-05-20
or 2020.12.25.17.05.20
or 2020-12-25-17:05:20
The EU way of using DD-MM-YYYY isn
ISO 8601 (Score:1)
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We should all move to stardate :)
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That only makes sense if you cater to machines first and humans second. The important information for most humans will be the day, not the year, therefore it should go first.
No, the most important thing is avoiding ambiguity and confusion in communication.
When you see 02/03 on an international forum, is it the 2nd of March or the 3rd of February?
It depends if you're from Europe or US.
The easiest way to make it clear to (almost) everybody with practically no retraining, is to include the year and reformat as YYYY-MM-DD, giving 2020-03-02 for the former and 2020-02-03 for the latter.
I've been doing it for decades, haven't heard a single complaint.
Re: No, it's 2020-02-02 (Score:1)
Re: No, it's 2020-02-02 (Score:1)
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Only for languages that read numbers left to right.
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That only makes sense if you cater to machines first and humans second. The important information for most humans will be the day, not the year, therefore it should go first.
If I owe you one hundred and three dollars, which number is more important? The three or the one? Or how about the September that never ended? Was it in 1993, 9319 or perhaps 3991?
In other words, we humans use big endian numbers all the time in all contexts that involve numbers. With dates, it's a bit more complicated -- of course, when you're talking about nearby dates, it's often enough to state the day only, because the month and the year are implicitly known. But ask me when I was born, and I'll have
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* until the day is become so irrelevant that we decide not to give it at all, e.g. February 2020
* until the month becomes so irrelevant that we decide not to give it at all, e.g. 2020
* until the year becomes so irrelevant that we decide not to give it at all, e.g. 21st century
* until the century becomes so irrelevant that we decide not to give it at all, e.g. first millennium BCE
* until the millennia become
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Less confusing than the US date format that's completely weird.
But if you want to be clear - spell out the month and have a 4 digit year. Then the ambiguity is minimal.
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yyyy-MM-dd, which is a text sortable format.
Not only sortable, it's much less prone to ambiguity (some countries use dd/mm/yyyyy).
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Without getting into the discussion of whether yyyy first is best for humans, let me mention that growing up I was exposed to American, European, and Brazilian ways of writing dates. What I noticed is that Americans, who use mm/dd, usually use a "/" for the separator, and the others who use dd-mm more commonly use "-" or ".". That's been occasionally useful to determine tha
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Why? Why should humans use a format designed for machines?
The machines serve US, not the other way around.
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The machines serve US, not the other way around.
That's just what the machines want you to think.....
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That's just what the machines want you to think.....
I don't think. Ha ha, take that, machines.
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Damn it, you outsmarted them!
Oh wait...
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With that said, lack of an international standard sometimes confuses things between people, and to me, yyyy-MM-dd makes the most logical sense in a left-to-right language, if only because it can be extended to the desired level of precision without affecting the sort order. And sort order isn't necessary something tied to machines, we sorted things well before
Your argument fails as not ISO 8601 compliant (Score:3, Insightful)
Please use the 2020-02-02 format
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Please use the 2020-02-02 format
Today is a palindrome in all three formats. But the next palindrome date will not be. It will be either 2021-12-02 (December 2nd) in ISO-8601, 12/02/2021 (February 12th) in international dd/mm/yyyy format, or 12/02/2021 (December 2nd) in American "middle first" format.
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Tomorrow, Monday, February 3, 2020, at 11:00:51 PM GMT, the Unix epoch time will be a palindrome: 1580770851.
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Plastic Money! (Score:2)
Slightly related - In the UK, the new plastic 20-pound-note comes out on 20/02/20 [wikipedia.org]
Aunty Entity update. (Score:2)
Re: Aunty Entity update. (Score:2)
Mod parent up
Good to know (Score:2)
Being an old fart, I remember fondly the last time, 909 year ago.
We had so much fun in the mud.
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Being an old fart, I remember fondly the last time, 909 year ago. We had so much fun in the mud.
You and Bernie Sanders ... must have been good times. :-)
And one of the few dates where (Score:3)
One of the few dates where the rest of the world looks to the USA and doesn't have to say "When the fuck are you talking about?"
Palindromic Date! (Score:5, Insightful)
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What about 12/02/2021 (my birthday, incidentally) -- that looks pretty palindromic to **ME**
They're talking about dates that qualify in both the MM/DD/YYYY format and the DD/MM/YYYY format.
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Really? The last one this century? What about 12/02/2021 (my birthday, incidentally) -- that looks pretty palindromic to **ME**, and it's only 17 months away! And why should we be excited over a palindromic date anyway?
It carries no significance of course, but some people like playing with numbers. If you ignore the part about this being a palindrome IN ALL COMMON FORMATS, you're right about 12/02/2021, but palindromic dates that fit one or two formats are much more common. I thought of January second, 2010 immediately (written as 01/02/2010 here), before realizing that the point of the article was that nearly everyone will see 02/02/2020 as a palindrome, while the same isn't true of 01/02/2010, since the same date is als
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17 months away?
What?
That is either a year and ten days (approximately 12 months) or a year and 10 months (22 months).
How the hell did you end up with 17 months?!
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Metric time.
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It says "international", as in it works in all date formats.
Most of the world would write your birthday as either 2/12/2021 or 2021/12/02.
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It's not global, USA would have it as 02/12/2021, which is not palindromic.
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Really? The last one this century? What about 12/02/2021 (my birthday, incidentally)
You were born in the FUTURE!!! ??? How far back have you come?
There were a bunch through the '00s. 20/02/2002, 20/04/2004 all the way up to 21/02/2012, I don't know if they follow the same rules but they were more interesting. Like 01/02/2003 and 02/03/2004 or 20/01/2001. No one noticed, until I would point it out to people. I used to play a game to see what others I could find during those years but the shame of having to hide my lust for numbers like a filthy magazine grew too much to bare a
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It is February 2, 2020, or 02/02/2020, in both the MM/DD/YYYY format and the DD/MM/YYYY format. [...] This is the only time such a date will occur this century.
I think it's pretty clear they were talking about being palindromic in both MM/DD/YYYY and DD/MM/YYYY formats, which isn't applicable to yours. That said, yesterday was also palindromic in YYYY-MM-DD format, which the summary neglected to mention, and your birthday next year is as well.
Football players can celebrate it, too (Score:1)
At the end of the Super Bowl tonight, one team can say "NOW I WON".
What about... (Score:1)
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Other calendering systems (Score:1)
Today is September, 9651 1993, the september that never ends.
Uh, no it's not (Score:1)
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What about 01-02-2010? (Score:2)
I can't believe the editors here fell for Facebook-level formation.
hoping to hit 20 million at 20:20 on 02/02/2020 .. (Score:2)
It's almost 20 million puzzles solved at https://www.calcudoku.org/ [calcudoku.org]
I'm hoping the number will be hit at 20:20:20 this evening, which will be definite proof we live in the matrix :-)
Arbitrary. Irrelavant. (Score:2)
Isn't the time position of the date 01/01/0001 totally arbitrary? As in relative to nothing in cosmic history. Of what possible significance is this?
Unix Time (Score:2)
Too Late (Score:2)
Palindrome? (Score:2)
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Give to the Aibohphobia Foundation! (Score:2)
Today being a palindrome is a great way to draw attention to the existence of a really good date standard, the ISO format. Meanwhile, the difference between the US standard and the public standard used in the rest of the world causes endless broken travel reservations. Americans who book an airline flight to Europe and a hotel in Rome for 5/2/2020 keep finding out when they show up at the airport in May that their trip had come and gone in February. The world needs to go ISO.
There are LOTS more.... (Score:2)
https://mobile.twitter.com/Sha... [twitter.com]
Sharyl Attkisson tweeted that, and was deluged with OTHER palindromic dates.
12/02/2021
11/02/2011
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And https://mobile.twitter.com/jam... [twitter.com]
James Taranto
@jamestaranto
I count 12 of them this century:
10/02/2001
01/02/2010
11/02/2011
today
12/02/2021
03/02/2030
04/02/2040
05/02/2050
06/02/2060
07/02/2070
08/02/2080
09/02/2090
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"I count 12 of them this century:"
Sorry, none of the others qualify.
Must be palindromes in all three formats.
Did you know that (Score:2)
not everybody in the world uses the Christian calendar.
Who used MM/DD/YYYY in 1111? (Score:2)
I don't think the US was using that format, yet...
Hardly (Score:2)
Nothing special about that time (Score:2)
Nothing special about 02:02:20. Now if it had been 02:22:20 it would be a palindromic time as well as date.
Calendar Man would be so excited (Score:2)
I bet he would celebrate.
33 Days, 333 Days to Go (Score:2)
Also heard that today is the 33rd day of the year, with 333 days left to go.