Ministry of Propaganda - 03/Apr/2006: "Stupid Numerology"

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Stupid Numerology

Someone posted this at work today and I expect it to be all over the web and blogs soon (as of writing this Technorati has 76 posts): On Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be: 01:02:03 04/05/06. That has never happened before and it will never happen again. For a number of reasons this is complete rubbish:

First of all this happens every 100 years, at least as long as the year is displayed using two digits (which it needs to be for it to work). It happened in 1506, it happened not that long in 1906 (looking at it worldwide probably several thousand people have experienced this one), it will happen again in 2106 (who knows, some people who read this might even experience it?) and if humankind and planet earth still exist then it will happen again in 10,006.

Then this assumes American date format, i.e. MM/DD/YY. However, most (if not all, not entirely sure) of Europe uses the DD/MM/YY format, meaning it will happen again in Europe on the first Thursday of May. Don't know about Africa, Asia and Australia. And if we were to apply the ISO recommended date format it wouldn't work at all, as it would be displayed as 2006-05-04T01:02:03 (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss).

Sorry to spoil the fun. (Liar. You're enjoying this, aren't you? Ed.)

Update: Another one, depending on what time format you use this will actually happen again only 12 hours later, at 1:00 in the afternoon assuming you use am/pm. Won't work with military format, as that would be 13:02:03 hrs.

End of entry

Entry trivia

When writing this entry the weather was: sunny (just, the sun has just set)
When writing this entry I was listening to: BBC 6 Music
I'm currently reading/have just finished reading this book/publication: none really
I recently visited this website/-page: A summary of the international standard date and time notation
The last drink I had was/is: milk

End of entry trivia

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