Discussion: 02022020-First in 900 years!

Today's date, an 8-place palindrome readable forward or backward, hasn't occurred in over 900 years! Carpé Diem!

Today's date has in fact never occurred before.

900 years, eh?

Hmm, what about:
11-02-2011
01-02-2010
10-02-2001

The key point is that it works in both dating systems, euro style and US style.

And early in the morning, there was the almost palindromic time of 02:02:20 matching the reduced date! The fully symmetric time of 02:22:20 just feels a bit more comforting and stays in the theme of twos and zeros.

Oh, my bad. Sorry for posting inferior examples of 8-place palindromes like the original post was pointing out. I'll never make that mistake ever again in my lifetime!

By "euro style" do you mean 'everywhere that's not the US'?

In the year 5678, the month of December will have 34 days

You're right Pink Socks; I was too quick to post. Glad I linked to the article to explain exactly what I meant: 11-11-1111 was the last 'ubiquitous' palindrome. And I guess the next such will be: 12-12-2121....just in case you want to mark your calendar. :-)

We are so lucky to have such a special palindrome date occurring in our lifetime

Hmm yes very lucky, so lucky in fact that I didn't know about it until the day after and missed the party!

What is more impressive. 02:02am 20/02/2020 now there is a palindrome date/time

The correct way to write the date is 2020-02-02 (although you can argue about the punctuation).

Was that with the month or day first?

Correct is subjective.

I'm not sure it has ever made sense to me to put the month before the day for a date (as in the US style). Why do you guys do that exactly? I mean I could ask about fahrenheit, miles, gallons, inches, feet etc as well...

@MCrone: I was going to post pretty much the same question, the US Month/Day/Year setup is simply insane!

I am willing to discuss Little-Endian (Day/Month/Year) vs Big-Endian (Year-Month-Day), but NOT Middle-endian: Y-M-D (ISO style) is clearly the winner among the sane alternatives.

There is at least one example from the computer world, where one (or more) DEC machines got severely messed up by having a mixture of Little-Endian and Big-Endian in the _same_ variable, i.e. it had 32-bit variables consisting of two 16-bit little-endian values, with the two halves in big-endian order.

Nobody have repeated this particular mistake, at least not in hw architectures. :-)

YYYY-MM-DD allows you to sort dates. Biggest things come first, like in normal numbers. (It's how Attackpoint uses dates in URLs, of course.)

To be honest that's how I name my map files (and also various other files I like to keep in order), e.g. if I update one but don't want to overwrite the old one, so that they are easy to sort in chronological order.

Also Terje, I think you'll find they prefer the term 'Native Datians'.

I can remeber a case from long long ago where data was stored to Access database. It sometimes worked correctly, sometimes not and someone joked it's "up to phase of the moon" (common saying). They eventyually found out sql happily inserted Day/Month/Year as Month/Day/Year untilll 13th day on it figured it must be Day/Month/Year and it automagically made that swap without errors or notices. So, customer noticed and complaned usually 5th day or so, a bit later engineers began to sort it out and finally 13th day the problem was "fixed" (no changes needed because it works), customer verified it is working and everyone was happy until about 5th day of next month it all started over again. When it finally was sorted out permanently they noticed they moon phase joke was actually the correct analysis.

All of our measurements make sense conversationally.

You generally know the year of something, so you just need month and day. On the rare occasions a year is useful, tack it on the end. It's not like we converted time to metric yet anyway. Sure, when the day is 1 kilominute long, it seems fair game. Also I looked up iso.org, and they list their contact address from small to big, street, city, country.

Farenheit: 0 is cold, 100 is hot. Celsius: 0 is somewhat but not all that cold, 100 will kill you. Not exactly sure when to visit the beach or stay home.

Height in feet, again, nod to imperial. 1.57 meters? I guess I'll pace that out?? What is Tinder like in Europe? "Swipe left if under 1.83 m?" That just seems inelegant.

Plus base 10 seems kind of silly when everything is calculated by computers anyway.

That said I save files with YYYYMMDD if I'm not using the _04_finalfinal_final_draftrev2 system.

Celsius: 0 is somewhat but not all that cold
There´s definitely logic to 0 Celsius since that´s the freezing point, while 100C is the boiling point (for water at sea level).

_04_finalfinal_final_draftrev2

My researchers seem to prefer this system to Git. It's "easier".

How many people own imperial feet?

"What is your shoe size?"
"One foot thanks."

Farenheit: 0 is cold, 100 is hot. Celsius: 0 is somewhat but not all that cold, 100 will kill you. Not exactly sure when to visit the beach or stay home.

I'll assume that post was made in jest! :-)

Any scale that you are used to will of course seem more "natural" than another one. For temperature C is obviously _far_ better if you are into classic XC skiing, since everything interesting wax-vise happens around zero.

Swatch did try to introduce a new time scale with 100K ticks/day, i.e. each tick was 0.864 seconds, but times and dates are pretty much locked down by history, even the length of second is defined by a Cs transition under conditions that cannot be exactly replicated afaik. The most accurate clocks use hydrogen masers anyway. :-)

The splitting of years into semi-fixed months and days is actually interesting from a programming perspective since it is hard to come up with a really efficient algorithm to convert from day number to date, my best attempt uses on the order of 10 microseconds on my current laptop.

There is something nice about the fact that 0 - 100F is an almost complete range of temperatures for most people to experience most of the time. It has a nicer tone to it than -20 - 40C. Also, it's easier to say, "it'll be in the 40s," than "it'll be in the upper single digits".

On the other hand I am totally in favor of kms to measure training distances because the sense of accomplishment is bigger with bigger numbers!

Every time someone says, "It'll be in the 40s", I have to do a calculation because that means nothing to me. On the other hand, "It'll be in the upper single digits" tells me exactly what to wear for a run. Depends where you grew up, I guess.

My weight is in pounds because it feels better to lose a bigger number. :)

"It'll be in the 40s" is an expression with which Australians have become depressingly familiar this summer.

(I do enough work with historical data - Australia changed over in 1972 - and American data to be fluent in both languages, so to speak).

Huh. Where I live in the USA, it's also that case that, at this time of year, "It'll be in the 40s" means somewhat warmer than it ought to be.

During our first visit to Oz, they were going on about temps hitting the century mark. I could understand that, but temp in the 40s? Means nothing, for us or our rellies. But that was about 1980 so they were still getting indoctrinated.

a stand up comedian skit i remember went something like this “I’m from the US and I find your country here in Canada cold. I mean you know it is colder because there is a big change in temperature at the border. Just the other day I heard it was 50 in Detroit and only 10 in Windsor across the river” ;-)

I'll be in my 40s for another few years yet. I don't really relish the alternative numbering system.

Thus prompted me to start thinking in Celsius: Countries that use Fahrenheit https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-0c3a67ca1e89...

Wow, a lot more than I expected.

Any scale that you are used to will of course seem more "natural" than another one. For temperature C is obviously _far_ better if you are into classic XC skiing, since everything interesting wax-vise happens around zero

An advantage of Fahrenheit is you get twice the precision without going to decimal points. A wax for 0 to +0.5 C is from 32 to 33 F. Ok, I know, a weak argument. But, I'm not sure I totally buy the _far_ better.

Far away the thing people like most is what they are familiar with.

Wait, what - does Fahrenheit use base 10 decimal points too????

Although strangely (to my mind), the US National Weather Service only records to whole degrees F, whereas almost all metric-using countries report to 0.1 C.

Celsius: 0 is somewhat but not all that cold, 100 will kill you.

Typical sauna temperature is 75-95 C, some like 100C but for me it is a bit too hot. I personally heat my sauna over 100 only if I feel like fine-tuning stiffness of my skis. It didn't kill me (not sure about my skis). 0C is the minimum water temperature of a frozen lake you dip after sauna, usually its around 1C. Personally I find that colder than just somewhat cold. Yes, I know I should Celsius wise HTFU.

Back in university we had a pair of wood-burning stoves in the saunas in the NTHI club cabin above Trondheim. Ingar Solberg & I tried to test once how hot we could make it, so with very dry firewood cut into small slices we managed to get the old Brodahls Badstu oven to start to glow red and the thermometer said 145C.

Ingar made a huge mistake while we started by taking a cold shower before entering the sauna: He brought a towel which he made thoroughly wet before taking it with him. I just sat right down on the dry wooden bench, while Ingar placed his towel on top of the wood, and before he had finished turning around and sitting down, the moisture started to come out as steam so he got a bit of a bum burn.

Here we see the difference between air temperature and water temperature, due to conduction. 0 C water is more than just somewhat cold, but 0 C air is not especially unpleasant. 100 C or more air is a bit too hot for a sauna, but 100 C water will in fact kill you.