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Skeletor

number oddities

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so, im sure some of you heard about the number oddity this year where on april 4, at 1:02 pm or something like that it would be 01-02-03-04-05-06

so, if you guys haven't noticed already (something tells me you guys do) there is another number oddity. June, 6, 2006 which is 06-06-06.

Odd.

article:
WASHINGTON (AP) - You don't find this happening every day. In a virtual blink of the eye early Wednesday morning, the time and date will be 01-02-03-04-05-06.

At 1:02 a.m. and three seconds on Wednesday, April 5, 2006, it will be the first hour of the day, the second minute of the hour, the third second of that precious minute in the fourth month and the fifth day of - uh, oh - it's not really the sixth year.
It's actually 2006 - only in our shorthand is it '06.
"It just happens to be a chronological oddity," said Geoff Chester, spokesman for the U.S. Naval Observatory, an official world atomic clock timekeeper. "If you were to use the full year, that would screw things up completely. You do have to bend it a little if you want to make it work. That's what you call 'Finagle's Law of Best Fit.' "
Even numerologists such as Rob Ragozzine, who runs the SimplyNumbers.com website, dismiss the 1-2-3-4-5-6 moment as merely "a neat coincidence" because of that pesky 2006 thing.

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The 4th of May, you mean! Too much Budweiser gets the date messed up over there...

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How many countries actually use MM-DD-YY? To me it's a stupid and illogical system. It starts with the middle unit, goes to the smallest one and then to the biggest one. DD-MM-YY or YY-MM-DD both make more sense. So how many countries, as standard, use MM-DD-YY. Is it primarily the US, or do other places do it too?

I think we should all adopt ISO 8601. :P

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I say use the DD-MM-YYYY because it's more consistant with addresses, for example. (You start with house number/street (smallest), then town/city (middle), and then (if it's international) country (largest))

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The American date format does have its logic, as it reflects a common way of stating the date verbally: "April the Seventh, 2006", etc.

It's certainly a shame it's not standardized internationally though.

When I want to be fairly sure a date is not misunderstood (at least by English speakers), I use a 3-letter abbreviation for the month and 4 digits for the year (e.g. 7-Apr-2006). The ISO standard still has scope for being misinterpreted by those unfamiliar with it, and requires the inclusion of a year, whereas you may not want to specify one for events that happen every year, etc.

As for the subject of this thread, I must say that I find these numerical "coincidences" entirely unremarkable.

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Grazza said:

The American date format does have its logic, as it reflects a common way of stating the date verbally: "April the Seventh, 2006", etc.


I suspect that way is more common in places where the American system is used. I would normally talk about the "seventh of April 2006", not "April the seventh 2006".

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Grazza said:
It's certainly a shame it's not standardized internationally though.

Not really a shame, if you ask me; there's greater clarity if the figure that changes more often (days) is across the one that seldom does (year.) Imagine if the seconds were between the minutes and the hours... Plus in Spanish, French and German the day goes first, anyway (apart from what Enjay said.)

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What I was getting at is that it's a shame that there is scope for confusion - that there are multiple formats used in different places and contexts, rather than one single convention (of one form or another) that is understood and used globally.

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Kristian Ronge said:
We use YYMMDD (probably just to make things even more confusing)...

Are you in China?

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Bloodshedder said:

Yeah, if everyone just used time_t, we'd have no problems.


Until January 19, 2038, at 3:14:07 GMT.

Although I suspect time_t will be at least 64-bits wide on the systems we're using by then...

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Fredrik said:

It's 1144423887 here.

So when will it be 1234567890? If I'm to assume that each tick there is a second, then that'll place us somewhere in the middle of February 2009.

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