Slashdot Mirror
This Rare Friday the 13th
Juha-Matti Laurio writes to point out a Washington Times story about how special this particular Friday the 13th is. The digits in the numerical notation for the date add up to 13 — whether you write it in the US or the European form. From the article: "The phenomenon hasn't happened in 476 years, said Heinrich Hemme, a physicist at Germany's University of Aachen who crunched the numbers to find that the double-whammy last occurred Jan. 13, 1520."
you're a numerologist, a mystic, a fortune teller or a similar quack. For most other people who happen to be superstitious, it's just another Friday the 13th. And for the rest of us, the overwhelming majority of rational folks, it's just another day...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
They needed a physicist to figure out the last time that happened?? Couldnt most first year CS majors write a program to calculate this??
If you find one that isn't, then it's unique in being the first one that isn't.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
What about the African form? ;)
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
"Give me ISO 8601 or give me death!"
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
if it affects how other people behave, then it affects you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Grandparent: Hasn't anyone noticed by now that this year, there was a Friday the 13th in January, which has the exact same digits as today? (01/13/2006 vs 10/13/2006) Meaning.. this phenomenon has happened within the last year?
Parent: Parent is right: 01/13/2006 was a Friday... this omission further proves that fatalysts and numerologists are quite slow mentally.
Furthermore, 2006-1520 = 486, not 476. Quite slow indeed. It's fun to blame the universe for everything that goes wrong all day when there's a Friday the 13th, but people who take the whole thing seriously should be shot in the face with a bazooka.
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
I think that the point of the GP is that it changes when the Fridays are.
YYYY-MM-DD is easily sortable for computers and is also the standard set by ISO 8601. This is the only correct and intuitive notation. Some countries use(d) DD.MM.(YY)YY which is at least easy to read for humans and maintains the order of most frequently changing to least frequently changing item. MM/DD/YY is just a mess and I can't count the times I've been confused by it.
All this gets worse when people use YY/MM/DD, DD/MM/YY or YYYY-DD-MM as I've seen recently, although the latter must have been a typo. As if
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
US notation is standardized MM/DD/YY
Which is just plain dumb. yy(yy)/mm/dd -- most significant first, is the best choice, but otherwise dd/mm/yy (least signficant first) is the next option. mm/dd/yy makes as much sence as yy/dd/mm, it's a random order.