Cambridge Computer IDs World's Most Boring Day

smitty777 writes "Scientists hard at work at Cambridge used a computer algorithm and nearly 300 million historical facts to identify the most boring day in history. The winner? On April 11, 1954, absolutely nothing happened. That is, unless you count the most boring day in the world happening."

Comments

I can say now: faulty

[santax]

For the software and it's conclusion to be valid you would have to have a dataset with ALL things that happened. That's include your dad tying his shoe-laces. So, this one can go to dev/null where it belongs. Rubbish. I hope it wasn't too expensive to do cause we gained absolutely nothing from it. Ah well, at least the prof was kept busy.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[phantomfive]

Not really, all you would need is a dataset of all the interesting things that happened. Your dad tying his shoelaces is in no way interesting. It's a simple heuristic.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[santax]

Thats not for you to decide what I find interesting. Man, maybe some genius was being made that day. Pretty interesting to me. Even if it would take 9 months to poop out. Maybe the CIA constructed some sort of great conspiracy that day.... Maybe Einstein came up with something really good that day.... If the dataset is lacking, it will not show up. And the dataset is lacking. Good news is, they want to use the software in other ways.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

all you would need is a dataset of all the interesting things that happened. Your dad tying his shoelaces is in no way interesting

It's all a matter of perspective: my dad tying his shoelaces would have been a major achievement, considering he had Parkinson's diseases.

In the same vein, consider, for instance, a bedouin, constantly on the move in the desert, who doesn't have access to any newspaper, TV, and pretty much doesn't know or give a fuck about anything outside his little world of camels and trading. For this guy, 9/11 was a completely ordinary day.

Despite what most westerners believe, it turns out that most things we consider important and newsworthy aren't even known to the vast majority of the world's population. So the most boring day picked up by Cambridge was only boring to people who share Cambridge's worldviews.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[IICV]

Seriously? Why are so many people reacting negatively to this?

Look, here's what happened: the researcher came up with some system for weighing the importance of events, probably kinda like page rank but with more structured information, and fed it a ton of historical data.

He then realized that from there, calculating the least important day (as defined by the sum of the importance of the events that happened during that day, I imagine - it certainly wasn't an average over the importances) was essentially just a query away.

Seriously guys, what's wrong with doing that? This researcher came up with a useful system that can answer this sort of question relatively easily, decided to ask the question and got a blurb about it in the newspaper. It probably took him all of five seconds to pose the question to the system, and then a max of maybe a couple of minutes for the system to spit out the answer. It's not like the whole thing is going to be tossed in the trash can now that this one useless question has been answered!

Re:I can say now: faulty

[thoughtfulbloke]

To determine the most boring day, you either need every fact or one fact: That on Good Friday, 1930, the B.B.C. evening news announcer led the bulletin with "There is no news tonight" and gave a piano recital in place of the normal bulletin.
Mentioned on the BBC website
or according to the software used, does the fact that the day was recognised as one on which nothing happened make the day itself interesting.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[santax]

Read the full article. There is no mention of such a system that weights the importance of events.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[camperdave]

So nothing happened that particular Good Friday. That doesn't mean that April 18th is not chock full of interesting stuff in other years: The Carpathia brought home the Titanic survivors on April 18th. Paul Revere rode in warning that day. Billy the Kid escaped from jail. Lucrezia Borgia, Conan O'Brien, and David Tennant were born on that day. Thor Heyerdahl, Albert Einstein, and some guy by the name of Julius Caesar (no not that one, an English judge) died that day.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're bitching because it was not the least interesting day for you? Geez, talk about self-centered. Why doesn't a team of Cambridge scientists dedicate themselves to something *I* might find interesting?
You sound like one of those pedantic dweebs that has learned not to enter my cubicle.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[ZackSchil]

Considering the current state of scientific journalism, that is basically all I need to conclude the system does exist.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[thoughtfulbloke]

Maybe a lot of interesting stuff did happen on April 18ths in other years. But the article is about the most boring day since 1900 (though that wasn't mentioned in the summary) rather than most boring day of the year, hence the computer determining April 11th 1954. April 18th 1930 was the day noted at the time as so boring they cancelled the evening news.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats not for you to decide what I find interesting.

Hey - that's not for you to decide what I decide.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

lots of events in Wikipedia on that day (I looked in French page). Including:
- A revolt in Yanaon in India against French sovereignty
- National election in Belgium
- France against Italy football match
- birth of Alexandre Averine, soviet runner
- 42nd French students union meeting
- Papanduva in Brasil becomes a town

I don't find this boring at all, so that whole "most boring day in history thing" is a hoax!

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

i.e. the people that matter...

Re:I can say now: faulty

[angus77]

...consider, for instance, a bedouin, constantly on the move in the desert, who doesn't have access to any newspaper, TV, and pretty much doesn't know or give a fuck about anything outside his little world of camels and trading. For this guy, 9/11 was a completely ordinary day.

The fact that some bedouin didn't know about it doesn't mean it was uninteresting---it doesn't even mean it would have been uninteresting to the bedouin to the bedouin. Do you seriously mean to suggest he would have been bored to hear that the tallest buildings in the world were destroyed by a couple of planes?

First I've heard of someone equating ignorance with "worldviews".

Re:I can say now: faulty

[J.J. Dane]

For some interesting research in the same field see:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/good-old-days-traced-back-to-single-weekend-in-194,18210/

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

My response seems to have vanished...

That's because your "Vanished" = everyone else's "-1, Pedant with Stick Up His Arse".

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering it happened in a place he'd never see or have relations in, why would he care?

The significant part of the news, to him, would have been that this meant the US would go on a rampage through the middle east again, leaving him pretty much screwed.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[fooslacker]

The idea of a "the most boring day" is the the consolidated most boring day for all of mankind...not the most boring day for santax, the dude who thinks Cambridge should be studying what he finds interesting.. Given that mankind as a whole generally records what it finds interesting and relevant in history books, news casts, and other public / government documents you can assume the rest of the stuff is generally noise. It's not that something important didn't happen or that something influential didn't happen just that it wasn't noteworthy or interesting to the whole of mankind at the time that it happened... hence it was a boring day

Re:I can say now: faulty

[silentcoder]

I had mod points but since there's no way to do it, consider this post to be a mode for:
-1 Doesn't know a thing about statistics.

Anyway, the identification of the most boring day was a sideline, the actual project is researching better ways of doing web searches, so your concerns about the "cost" is irrelevent, if you have a project with one notable and worthwhile goal - and one way to test it gives you an interesting bit of sideline knowledge, I consider that a nett gain for science.

Remember -the first pulsar's were discovered by accident by radio astronomers who were actually looking for SETI like signals.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Jarik C-Bol]

the database is lacking, on that date, Arthur Murray flew the X-1A on a test flight. Any test flight of that thing is by definition 'not boring'
Heck, just feeding that date into wikipedia returns several notable results, including the above.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[silentcoder]

>April 18th 1930 was the day noted at the time as so boring they cancelled the evening news.

In Britain - there are plenty of other countries, where many interesting things may well have happened that simply didn't reach British news services in time.

More-over the software also considers events that NEVER make the news on the same day - things like famous people born that day and such. It took me about 30 seconds to learn that at least one celebrity (Actor Clive Revil) was born on that day.

The day identified here had only one birth that comes close being noteworthy, that of a phycicist.

Sincerely
The guy who actually RTFA'd.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[TFAFalcon]

Why not pick a day for which there are no records? There are probably fewer interesting things recorded about April 11th 1954 BC. The researchers probably just decided to exclude all of the thousands of years which were probably pretty boring, just because we don't have as much documentation about them. Who knows what we would know about April 11th 1954 AD if they had twitter back then.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Katchu]

What is a "Cambridge?"

Re:I can say now: faulty

[tverbeek]

Abdullah Atalar (and his parents) would definitely disagree about the lack of historical signficance to that day.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Gordonjcp]

The fact that some bedouin didn't know about it doesn't mean it was uninteresting---it doesn't even mean it would have been uninteresting to the bedouin to the bedouin.

It wasn't even particularly interesting to me, and I'm not a bedouin.

Do you seriously mean to suggest he would have been bored to hear that the tallest buildings in the world were destroyed by a couple of planes?

<shrug> and...? The main thing I remember about September 11th 2001 was that I had to drive around a few different places to find some hydraulic fluid, and there wasn't anything interesting on the radio - just some shite about a building collapsing in the US.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[drinkypoo]

The problem is that you can't actually know whether it's the most boring day ever unless you know everything that happened on that day. Maybe the cabal that rules the world today (or picks color palettes or something) was secretly formed on that day.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Talderas]

Were you, by any chance, born on April 11, 1954?

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

Or was it the day they worked this out?

Yawn

Re:I can say now: faulty

[mr_gorkajuice]

You do, however, remember what you did on september 11th, 2001.
What where the most interesting things that happened to you on september 8th 2001, and september 14th, 2001?

Re:I can say now: faulty

[naich]

Just to clarify - the "researcher" is employed by a private company that he founded himself. There is no tax money involved. This is not your tax dollars/pounds at work, this is a private individual, working for his own private company generating some publicity for himself. Take a look at his website. http://www.williamtp.com/ Once again - there is no public money involved.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Stele]

Man, maybe some genius was being made that day. Pretty interesting to me. Even if it would take 9 months to poop out.

Skipped sex ed, huh?

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

you must be new here: this is what these dipshits _live_ for! Some story that gives them an opportunity to be contrarian and seem brainier than the rest of us all in one. What they don't get is that when there's a whole forum full of them, it just makes them look sad... racing to be the first one to type an "insightful" reply.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Gordonjcp]

September 8th 2001 I replaced the knackered front wing and the windscreen washer bottle on my car, trolled slashdot for a bit, went to band rehearsals and then went to the pub with my sister and her then-boyfriend, then went back to theirs to drink beer and play on the Playstation. I can't remember what we played, probably Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (possibly THPS2, but I'd need to check Wikipedia for the release date to be sure).

September 14th 2001 was the second Friday in the month and therefore payday, so I went into work late having spent the morning paying bills and doing the bank run. We had joiners in building an enclosed server room and workshop, so when I got into the office I hung around for a meeting then cleared off home early. I tended to work from home a lot then anyway, having blazingly-fast 512kbps cable internet. Once I'd got a bunch of PHP crap out of the way (hey, shouldn't we be updating to PHP4? Me and my big mouth) I went to the pub with my sister and a couple of her friends from work. We won the pub quiz, four bottles of rather nice Chilean Burgundy, with our arch-rivals "Splodgeness Abounds" just trailing us until it ended in a tie-breaker.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

Sincerely
The guy who actually RTFA'd.

GTFO slashdot, you know thats not allowed, especially before posting

Sincerely
Anonymous Coward

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

And your diagnostics are...!?

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

There was an election in Belguim (Belguim!) and John Francis Lickerish was born in Cambridge.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

My mother born at that day. And you are calling that day a most boring.... (well, I were not there to proof that happening but hey, she is my mother!)

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Gordonjcp]

And your diagnostics are...!?

I wish to fsck I could remember useful stuff, like Mrs Gordonjcp's phone number, or the alarm code for the workshop, or where I left the keys for the shed...

Re:I can say now: faulty

[TimHunter]

A negative reaction is reflexive for most /.'ers for most /. stories, unless the story engages his native sense of self-entitlement in which case he replies with moral outrage. He fills his comments with sarcasm and cynicism, trying to look experienced and wise, but actually he just sounds grumpy, tiresome and repetitive.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[apoc.famine]

What if, by some chance of fate, half the world didn't tie their shoelaces that day? That'd be interesting, although each event would definitely not be. So there is some (very minimal) point to the GP's statement that you can't just decide what's interesting, and then go look for it. You might miss something truly interesting and never know it.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you seriously mean to suggest he would have been bored to hear that the tallest buildings in the world were destroyed by a couple of planes?

By no means do I mean to downplay the tragic events of 9/11, but "the tallest buildings in the world"? They weren't even the tallest buildings in America. The Twin Towers were only the tallest building in the world for two years until the Sears Tower was built in Chicago. That building is only the 7th tallest building in the world today, although it was the 3rd tallest building in 2001.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Machtyn]

It may not have been interesting to you at the time. However, the ramifications of the event and how it likely affects your life today is probably interesting. Perhaps you fly less or are more annoyed by going through sexual assault when attempting to board a plane. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps you are the type of person that rarely leaves your locale... any traveling you do is by car or train. But then, you are affected by having more motorists on the road, travelers on the train because there are others who fly less.

Perhaps, also, the bedouins, who have no knowledge of the 9/11/01 events, will have noticed quite a few more SUVs, tanks, and men with American guns on the trails they usually frequent (assuming they are nomadic in the Arabian Peninsula).

Re:I can say now: faulty

[tehcyder]

I couldn't tell you what I was doing on September 14th 2010 except that if it was a work day I was probably in the office. Unless I wasn't.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[tehcyder]

So what was the most important or interesting day in history, I wonder?

Re:I can say now: faulty

[tehcyder]

*sigh* I don't think they ever said that nothing at all happened on that day.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[rjstanford]

It wasn't a day on which nothing happened, simply the day on which the lowest quantity of interesting things[0] happened.

Sheesh.

[0] As defined by the people who actually did the work

Re:I can say now: faulty

[blackraven14250]

That just means nothing happened in the U.K., or of significance to the U.K, where the BBC knew about it before proclaiming that there was no news. Other things may have happened elsewhere, and been significant within other countries. You know, like some revolutionaries in Bangladesh beginning an uprising against British colonial rule in Chittagong.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

Boring day, or a day where peace and harmony reared its beautiful head, promptly looked around and said,

"Once a century is good enough for me."

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

Well firstly, nobody said "interesting" had to mean "beneficial". From that perspective it's still interesting even if it means his life is about to go down the toilet (there is a curse, may you live in interesting times...). Secondly, I'm from the UK, I'm still likely to never see or have relations in the US, that doesn't mean I found the events uninteresting. Likewise if it had happened in China or Russia, I would have found the news interesting.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[delinear]

I'd be surprised if half the total population of the world wore shoes that day. I think the point is that they likely measured this by seeing what the most interesting things were that filtered to the top and affected the lives of the greatest number of people. I'm sure on an individual basis literally millions of interesting things were happening, but really the only way to measure this is to take things that impact more than individuals. You might consider a day where only one interesting thing happens to be largely boring. If the same happens for every person in the world, then that's a day where 6 billion interesting things happened, yet if you ask anyone about it they'd say it was boring, so it has to be based on events that effect a large number of people - and they tend to be easier to find out about.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[delinear]

I know she's your mother, but around 3-400,000 people are born every day, so if you're calling a single birth something of significant interest, you're setting the bar pretty low. What do you call the moon landing? You'd need a whole new scale. On top of that, even if your mother grew to be the most amazing person who ever lived, nobody would know that at the time of her birth (unless the birth itself was a remarkable circumstance, like ensuring a line of succession or the first test tube baby or something). It would be of interest to her family and their friends, but outside of that, a blip in the grand scheme. It would only be when she got older and actually did something of interest that it would register.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[dominious]

It's all a matter of perspective: my dad tying his shoelaces would have been a major achievement, considering he had Parkinson's diseases.

Historically speaking, and for man-kind... we don't care about your dad (unless there was a medicine involved which cured him, but that would make the newspaper so it wouldn't be a boring day after all).

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

As would everyone else born on that day but I believe the parent's point stands...it's not about what's significant to an individual but what's significant to mankind as a whole on that day. Albert Einstein could have been born on that day and it might still be the most boring day. The idea of a boring day isn't did anything happen that might be important 20 years later. It's about what significant and noteworthy to mankind at that time happened that day. No argument that the day was important to an individual or important in the future makes it any less (or more) of a boring day.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[fooslacker]

Agreed...you can probably only legitimately run this algorithm for periods for which we have sufficient volume of records and that determination is likely a subjective one. I mean technically the most boring day is probably a tie for the ones all before modern man existed but now we're getting silly and arguing nothing. It (at least to me) was an interesting line of inquiry in the sense that it is an interesting data mining and analysis problem. Quibbling over how the problem should have been structured different is less interesting.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Scaba]

Cheers to the birth of inventor of lickerish (not to be confused with licorice)!

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Gordonjcp]

Well, I live in the UK, so the greatest impact on my life has been the vast quantity of money getting sucked from my wallet to pay for pulling US soldiers out of trouble - again. Other than that, we don't have pornoscanners or serial gropers at our airports, and I prefer to drive anyway. The only restriction on travel I encountered was when the very polite lady at the UK Customs checkpoint in Dover asked me if I could possibly leave my multi-tool in the car, rather than carry it with me on the ferry to France. Fuck flying.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[poliscipirate]

First I've heard of someone equating ignorance with "worldviews".

Welcome to Earth. Unfortunately it happens quite often here.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[madprof]

This isn't a researcher - it is a story put out by a company, True Knowledge, who claim to have "world's first AI question-answering platform".

It's a puff piece for True Knowledge to say "look how much we know". Which is nice for them.

Good luck to True Knowledge anyway. It's not as if they're competing with Microsoft and Google for our attention. Oh wait...

Re:I can say now: faulty

[angus77]

Well, man, I guess you're just too kool for skool.

I hope I never grow up to be as cool as you.

(And somehow I doubt the bedouin would be).

Re:I can say now: faulty

[angus77]

Sorry, should have been "two of the tallest buildings"...one of those things a spell checker will never catch.

It should have been obvious, though. How could a couple of planes take out all the tallest buildings in the world? And where would you draw the line as to which buildings counted as tallest and which didn't?

Re:I can say now: faulty

[angus77]

An ignorance-based worldview is one thing.

Assuming someone didn't care about something they didn't hear about was due to their worldview (rather than the fact that they just hadn't heard about it) is what I was referring to.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? Why are so many people reacting negatively to this?

I don't think they care, I think they're just bored.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[SleazyRidr]

It's awesome how you can look up a date on wikipedia isn't it?

Re:I can say now: faulty

[Geminii]

Or it was just the day with the least amount of interesting news released.

Maybe we could get bigger headlines with "World's Most Censored Day Revealed" :)

Re:I can say now: faulty

[twebb72]

Thankfully, there is never a day without news anymore, so long as Sarah Palin is around.

Re:I can say now: faulty

[mick88]

Amen, Brother. I wish I had mod points for you.

Google agrees..

[moogied]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=April+11%2C+1954+-%22The+-Most+-boring+-day+-in+-the Nothing happened...

Slow News Day

[Archangel Michael]

Must be the second most boring day ...

Re:Slow News Day

[Ismellpoop]

Not in Canada anyway. Every is just passed out drunk from to much Grey Cup celebrations.

Re:Slow News Day

[nos2k]

And you just know that on this particular day, some boy sat around thinking "Today is the most boring day in the history of the universe" - and hey, he was right!

Re:Slow News Day

[JustOK]

Surely this is more important: Leslie Nielsen died.

Re:Slow News Day

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely this is more important: Leslie Nielsen died.

Don't call me Shirley.

Re:Slow News Day

[JustOK]

I wasn't going to call you and my name isn't Shirley.

Re:Slow News Day

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Leslie passing away is the only thing keeping this day from being the #1.
I wonder how bored the person has to be to spend time studying and researching this?

I'm glad I'm not at that point yet.

Re:Slow News Day

[AndrewNeo]

That was yesterday, though. That would, however, make today boring :(

Re:Slow News Day

[Anonymous Coward]

>Surely this is more important: Leslie Nielsen died.

No, Shirley (and Leslie) died yesterday (Sunday)

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's my birthday, you insensitive clod!

My Birthday

[shikaisi]

That's my birthday, you insensitive clod.

Re:My Birthday

[Anonymous Coward]

^ Ninja'd...

Re:My Birthday

[Kilrah_il]

Well, you just gave us some corroborating evidence. Thanks.

Re:My Birthday

[LynnwoodRooster]

I'm sorry, who are you and why should I care?

Re:My Birthday

[TolkienLibrary]

omg... imagine a super computer calculating the most boring day in human history and ending up at your birthday! Wonder what that tells about the super computer or about you!

Re:My Birthday

[martas]

not buyin' it, mr. or ms. over-1.5-meg-slashdot-ID.

Re:My Birthday

[Errtu76]

What does his id have to do with his birthdate?

Re:My Birthday

[JockTroll]

Well, it's your party and you can cry if you want to. Cry if you want to. Cry if you want to.

Re:My Birthday

[martas]

ummm, seniority???!!!!ONE!@!!!

The 10 days nothing happened...

[c0lo]

... on the calendar in use today by the western civilization: 5 Oct 1582 to 14 Oct 1582 inclusive. ( :) and, yet, I didn't ask for research funds to feed the computer to reach this 'True knowledge'...)

Re:The 10 days nothing happened...

[Hognoxious]

on the calendar in use today by the western civilization: 5 Oct 1582 to 14 Oct 1582 inclusive

Incorrect. Open a terminal and type cal 9 1752

Re:The 10 days nothing happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. Came here to post this. Sep 3, 1752 thru Sep 13, 1752 were so uneventful that they decided to remove the days from the calendar.

September 1752
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
.. .. .1 .2 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Re:The 10 days nothing happened...

[complete loony]

You're both right... from a certain point of view.

The last day of the Julian calendar was Thursday, 4 October 1582 and this was followed by the first day of the Gregorian calendar, Friday, 15 October 1582

Britain and the British Empire (including the eastern part of what is now the United States) adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752 by which time it was necessary to correct by 11 days. Wednesday, 2 September 1752 was followed by Thursday, 14 September 1752

Re:The 10 days nothing happened...

[c0lo]

:) Your cal must be protestant. Somehow, still better than a Russian orthodox cal, but worse than an Irish Catholic one :)

Re:The 10 days nothing happened...

[c0lo]

Yep. Came here to post this. Sep 3, 1752 thru Sep 13, 1752 were so uneventful that they decided to remove the days from the calendar.

September 1752 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa .. .. .1 .2 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

:) Nope, can't be! The Sep 3 1752 is the date the Anglican churches decided to finally adopt the Gregorian calendar. :)

Re:The 10 days nothing happened...

[Anonymous Coward]

From a certain point of view?

Re:If I remember correctly...

[Anonymous Coward]

He was born in '53, so I'm guessing you mean his baptism? RMS would consider anyone forcing him to take a bath as assult.

Doesn't this in fact make it an interesting day?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't getting named the most boring day actually make that day interesting for not being interesting, thus the day is no longer boring. I think they should shoot for something like the 12th most boring day in history to avoid this happening.

Very imprecise

[Anonymous Coward]

They should have narrowed it down to the most boring hour and minute.

Time travel!

[MrQuacker]

Now we know the first location we can safely visit once time travel is perfected.

Kirk Douglas' Dad

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't Kirk Douglas' Father die on that die?

I am pretty sure there was an armistice in the Egyptian war too.

Paul Specht died.

There was a trade of Enos Slaughter in baseball.

There was an earthquake in the Soloman Sea

The first Turbine car was shown at the Autolite parade of stars.

Meh, a lot happened on that day. Pedoe is an idiot.

Snowball

[Anonymous Coward]

People born in that day will be very angry..

Great Scott

[Cylix]

This is also the day that doc brown fell and hit his head on a toilet seat and when he came to he had the idea for a machine to read minds.

Slashdot Poll

[srussia]

That's my birthday, you insensitive clod.

I was born on:

The most boring day in history

A different April 11

April Fool's

In 1954, and I'm still living in my Mom's basement

A workbench in my Mom's basement

Re:Slashdot Poll

[oodaloop]

What about,"I was born on Cowboy Neal"?

That is until...

[Anonymous Coward]

56 years, 7 months, and 18 days later... when April 11th, 1954 was slashdotted.

Re:Doesn't this in fact make it an interesting day

[snl2587]

Great! Now you've made the 12th most boring day interesting. Oh well: I guess we can always look to the 13th mo...DAMN IT!

Or maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe everyone had so much fun they just totally forgot to write it down? Or maybe even something really did happen but everybody agreed that it was better if later generations never knew about it? Someone is clearly hiding something here

Re:Or maybe

[Neil Boekend]

Maybe the 10th was so good everybody had a hangover on the 11th and decided to call in sick and stay at home.

"Suicide Bomb" Reference

[markass530]

anyone read a little bit on the telegraph page? It talks about a "Cobalt" bomb and why it would not be effective because.. (wait for it..) it would be suicide to use it. It then defines a good weapon as one that destroys the enemy without harming those who use it. Oh how I long for he good ole' days of warfare.

...That we know of...

[masterwit]

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated. For instance, at the very moment that Arthur Dent said "I wouldn't want to go anywhere without my wonderful towel," a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle. The two opposing leaders, resplendent in their black jewelled battle shorts, were meeting for the last time, when, a dreadful silence fell, and, at that very moment, the words, "I wouldn't want to go anywhere without my wonderful towel" drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately, in their native tongue, this was the most appalling insult imaginable, so the two opposing battle fleets decided to settle their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our galaxy, now positively identified as the source of the offending remark. For thousands of years the mighty starships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the planet Earth - where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - credit imdb for exact quote
The real left out portion is: that we know of... if we recall an older movie also (sorry I'm on a movie quoting mode and it doesn't matter if you like this one or not), It's a Wonderful Life, we can see how a pointless life was only appreciated when that life was taken out of the picture and the two alternate universes were left to comparison.

Did this supercomputer calculate an entirely alternate universe for every day and conclude that the universe closest to our present day implied the most boring day? I think not!

Mr Tunstall-Pedoe's computer programme, called True Knowledge, came to its lofty decision after being fed some 300 million facts about "people, places, business and events" that made the news.

This is about people, yes the view is that shallow but it really is to all us as the human race can record.

If a tree fell in the woods, and nobody was there to hear it, did it really make a sound?

And who is to say the news reports interesting stories anymore? Because I am in the movie citing mode (sorry), think of Anchorman, and that water-skiing squirrel. Well anyone that has been around a local news organization can say that what constitutes important or newsworthy may not exactly be important or significant. So the presence of news and information for a particular date would not necessarily make that "less boring" in terms of what the human race considers boring.

(I need a beer)

...

"It is of course well known that careless Slashdot Stories costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated..."

Re:...That we know of...

[tehcyder]

If a tree fell in the woods, and nobody was there to hear it, did it really make a sound?

Yes, and I cannot be sure of anything I do not directly apprehend through my senses, therefore the Apollo Moon landings, the First World War and 9/11 are untrue.

Most boriing for computer? Day it ran this algo

[noidentity]

I bet the computer wished it could tell the researchers that the day they made it find the most boring day in history was itself the most boring for the poor computer.

Not in "history"

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the 20th Century was considered, seemingly

o`relly

[Anonymous Coward]

April 11, 1954 - Kenya authorities announced that negotiations with Mau Mau terrorists for a mass surrender had broken down and had been abandoned

Re:Doesn't this in fact make it an interesting day

[antifoidulus]

Reminds me of one of the futurama commentaries when they were talking about the proof that there are no uninteresting numbers. Suppose there were a set of uninteresting numbers, then there would have to be a minimum in that set, but since the minimum uninteresting number is interesting, there cannot be any uninteresting numbers.

Make that the third

[BadAnalogyGuy]

December 8, 2002 was really boring. Nothing important happened.

Not tax dollars at work

[Anonymous Coward]

This person who did this work, Mr Tunstall-Pedoe, is not an academic Cambridge University. He is not even a scientist or researcher. He is the CEO of his own firm True Knowlegde (sic).

The connection with Cambridge is that it happens to be the town he lives in. He also attended the university there, 15 years ago, and still does part-time teaching of undergraduate courses.

This silly story is just an attempt to raise the profile of his company. The "results" should be considered in the spirit of fun and not as legitimate scientific output.

By name-dropping Cambridge, in order to try and impart some credibility to the story, both the original Telegraph article and Slashdot summary intentionally misleading.

Re:Not tax dollars at work

[Sockatume]

To be fair, at least he's doing it to raise the profile of his own company. Year-in, year-out we get unscrupulous scientists coming up with (or simply endorsing) "formulas" to go with "research" coming out of the marketing arms of all kinds of bullshit companies in exchange for cold hard cash, which is much, much lower. The most famous is that stupid "mole people" item that escaped from a press release about the Time Machine remake (!) appearing on Bravo (!) and ran amok through the media, causing all sorts of debate before anyone bothered to examine the total invalidity of the exercise.

Re:Not tax dollars at work

[tehcyder]

I don't assume that anything coming out of Cambridge is to do with the University, any more than I would about, Bristol or Edinburgh.

something like math here

[jimouri]

Well, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox. So, at least a posteriori, there is no such thing as a boring (==uninteresting) day.

Re:something like math here

[LiENUS]

posteriori

I LOVE THAT STUFF. It's the san francisco treat you know.

Not boring in Belgium

[Anonymous Coward]

In Belgium, there were elections on April 11, 1954. The Catholic Party lost its absolute majority in parliament, which resulted into an anti-clerical government of the Liberal Party (right of center) and the Socialist Party. This change had a major impact on the Belgian educational system, being the "Schoolstrijd" (School Struggle). Not a boring day at all.

Re:Not boring in Belgium

[Anonymous Coward]

This only reinforces the computer's conclusion. Belgium is the very definition of boring.

Re:Not boring in Belgium

[Ash-Fox]

In Belgium, there were elections on April 11, 1954. The Catholic Party lost its absolute majority in parliament, which resulted into an anti-clerical government of the Liberal Party (right of center) and the Socialist Party. This change had a major impact on the Belgian educational system, being the "Schoolstrijd" (School Struggle). Not a boring day at all.

Boooooring!

Re:Not boring in Belgium

[paxcoder]

Interesting.
Not for Ash-Fox I guess. His definition of fun is getting mockery mod points. His modders agree.

Re:Not boring in Belgium

[Phydaux]

Just because a day can be the "world's most boring", doesn't mean that the day itself is boring. It's just more boring than all the others.

I can imagine a conversation from that day

[dmomo]

From TFA:Plans for the coup d'etat in Yanaon, then a small French colony in India, are also believed to have been hatched that on the evening of April 11 1954 but nothing actually happened that night.

Dadala Raphael Ramanayya: Gentlemen, prepare yourselves. This is a great Historical night!!

Dudes: HUZZZAH!

Was an early spring Sunday

[findoutmoretoday]

For people not living in cellars feeding large computers,  it was an early spring Sunday on the western hemisphere.  Even the smallest amount of sun makes such a day great. 

Yes, that's correct.

[Futurepower(R)]

I remember that day. It was boring.

Viet Nam and the Comet Jet-liner inquiries

[MagikSlinger]

Front-page: America & England discuss the problems in "Indochina". That's Viet Nam to you younglings.

Also: a report on the status of the Comet disaster investigation which would lead to major changes in aviation and introduce us to the safe age of jet travel. When metal fatigue became an everyday part of the aeronautical engineer's lexicon...

It may have been event-less, but the bubbling of bigger things are quite apparent.

Re:Doesn't this in fact make it an interesting day

[DMUTPeregrine]

Insert the interesting number paradox here.

on the contrary

[Errtu76]

I bet Jack Shufflebotham's relatives would disagree ..

Re:If I remember correctly...

[MichaelSmith]

I'm guessing you mean his baptism?

Unlikely. RMS is Jewish.

For fucks sake

[naich]

This is not "scientists hard at work at Cambridge". As a scientist who actually works in Cambridge doing real research, it's pretty offensive to see this phrase attached to a story about a single person (who is not a scientist) drumming up some publicity by releasing a press release about some random old cobblers he's supposedly calculated using his super duper computer program. Can we just all try to be a little less gullible please?

Not as uneventful as 1582/10/12 or 1752/9/13

[maxwells_deamon]

Nobody at all was born or died on those days in some parts of the world!

Re:Doesn't this in fact make it an interesting day

[camperdave]

Suppose there were a set of uninteresting numbers, then there would have to be a minimum in that set

Logic Fail! In an infinite set of numbers there does not have to be a minimum number. Suppose all the real numbers were uninteresting. What is the minimum real number? There is none. Since one of your premises is false, your conclusion is not sound. Thus there may be uninteresting numbers.

Dates are numerical data

[Anonymous Coward]

The options would most likely be "Between 1900-1920", "Between 1920-1940", "Between 1940-1960", "Between 1960-1980", "Between 1980-2000", "I'm waiting for Cowboy Neal to conceive me"

Baby Boom

[joeme1]

There was a spike in births shortly after this date. I'd say they might have to take a little more into consideration for their algorithm, or did the most boring day cause this spike in procreation?

Re:Baby Boom

[sempir]

or did the most boring day cause this spike in procreation?

I can assure you that if nine months after this day a "baby boom" occurred it was most definitely NOT a boring day! Quite the opposite in fact.

No longer so boring.

[RavenousBlack]

Doesn't making it the world's most boring day also make it much less boring?

Re:No longer so boring.

[tehcyder]

Doesn't making it the world's most boring day also make it much less boring?

No.

Publicity Stunt

[Anonymous Coward]

it's just one "scientist" and not "scientists" according to the linked article
he was just "educated" at Cambridge, this is not university work.

according to his website http://www.williamtp.com/ he's employed at his AI-startup which is named the same way as his miraculous program

nothing to see here, fake "study" used to garner funds

Interesting number paradox

[saibot834]

Wikipedia and WolframAlpha would beg to differ.

More interesting though, there is an parallel to the Interesting number paradox: If there is an uninteresting natural number (or day), there must be a smallest (earliest) uninteresting natural number (date), which would make it interesting of course. Therefor, all natural numbers (days) are interesting.

Re:Interesting number paradox

[tehcyder]

Why would being the smallest/earliest (or largest/latest) make something intrinsically interesting? Or are you using the word "interesting" in a specific mathematical way?

Why is this a "Computer IDs world's..." article

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's get real, they had a database of 300 million events. They type in one line of SQL and look for the minimum number of events on a certain date.

Let's not get too carried away here. Unless the computer decided to figure this out on it's own and called up the researchers in the middle of the night to announce it's finding, then it was just a researcher looking for something to do that stumbled across this.

There's no angle by while specialized or powerful computing had to relate into this sensational article.

Re:Why is this a "Computer IDs world's..." article

[omnichad]

Not least number of events. Most boring events (least significant).

Important Election day in Belgium

[bmcage]

The election that day in Belgium was quite important. Changed the coalition to socialist and liberals, causing a huge 'rebellion' later on when they tried to change the school system (which was Catholic dominated), Schoolstrijd.

Re:Important Election day in Belgium

[jc42]

The election that day in Belgium was quite important.

Ah, c'mon; we all know that Belgium is the most boring country on the planet. ;-)

Actually a search start-up True Knowledge

[williamtp]

The 'scientists' are actually employees of trueknowledge.com - an AI question answering start-up. The experiment was a fun bit of work that dropped out of compiling hundreds of millions of machine understandable facts about the world. The original story is here: http://blog.trueknowledge.com/2010/11/most-boring-day-in-history.html

Get your facts right

[aggro_nerd]

I'd just like to to point out that these guys aren't technically scientists and certainly aren't scientists at Cambridge University! The press seems to have jumped the gun with this one and a lot of silly assumptions have been made about this on a slow news day. Also, the work wasn't actually done by one person, but a company called True Knowledge. Their original blog article can be found here on blog.trueknowledge.com/2010/11/most-boring-day-in-history.html.

Surname

[jimbob666]

That scientist has an unfortunate surname :-/

Re:If I remember correctly...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlikely. RMS is Jewish.

That would explain a lot.

Time Zone?

[Anonymous Coward]

The "day" they refer to, is not an actual time-span, as no timezone is specified. Instead what is referred to is the idea of "April 11, 1954" which has (slightly) different actual meaning depending on which timezone observer/referrer is located in.
Not to mention to people travelling across timezones, datelines and what not..

Most boring day for posts

[Things_falling_apart]

All these replies from people mentioning events that happened on this day in order to try to invalidate the claim that this wasn't the most boring day in history, and yet none of these are offering any suggestion of which day is a better contender. Please don't just say "this cannot be the most boring day because [insert random event] happened on this day!" and think you are clever without offering a new day which could take its place.

My dad...

[Anonymous Coward]

My dad was born on 11 april 1954

Today then...

[SpaghettiPattern]

Today then... Must be a serious contender for second place... For me anyway...

Note to self: Must get a life.

Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe that. There were days that were abolished by the pope to correct the calender. a couple of weeks that literally never happened. I'm pretty sure that more happened on a day that actually occured than on a day that didn't.

Re:Seriously?

[Things_falling_apart]

Wouldn't those end-is-near people need to correct for this if they are following the prophecies made before those missing days? Also, wouldn't we need to reopen the debate as to when Y2K actually happened?

4/11/54

[fulldecent]

Isn't that Godel's birthday?

Holiday

[Anonymous Coward]

I say we make this a holiday. From now on, the 11th of April of every year will be Boring Day.

Day for celebration

[DataPath]

We should celebrate the anniversary of the most boring day in history.

April 11th, Annual Most Boring Day Celebration. You celebrate it by... not doing anything special.

link to the question on true knowledge

[AeiwiMaster]

Here is a link to the database and the question
http://www.trueknowledge.com/q/what_was_the_most_boring_day_in_history

You say it's your birthday?

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine if your birthday is April 11, 1954. What would you think of that. Being born on the most boring day in recent history.

Perhaps the follow up to this would be to see what the people born on this day are like? Are they boring, or more extroverted? Do they like horror movies more than others? These individuals would turn 18 right in the middle of the Vietnam war. Not exactly boring then. However, those baby boys born on April 11 were in good shape. Their draft lottery numbers for 1972 and 1973 were 324 and 350 respectively.

I propose

[digitalPhant0m]

Day -1 would probably have had to be the most boring day, if there was anyone around to experience it.

All numbers are interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

That is, unless you count the most boring day in the world happening.

This reminds me of the classic proof that all numbers are interesting:

Assume the contrary, and suppose that there are some uninteresting numbers. Let x be the smallest uninteresting number. But, hey, that makes x pretty interesting! A contradiction, so the assumption must be false. Therefore, no uninteresting numbers exist. QED.

not anymore ...

[mattstorer]

How many people clicked on the link to read about the World's Most Boring Day? How intriguing! Let me read about that!

Not so boring now, is it? I foresee the topic of April 11, 1954 becoming an overnight internet meme sensation, retroactively promoting the day to one of reverence, in a not-dissimilar fashion to the mechanism by which certain artists become famous and revered only many years after they've departed.

Any takers? Yes? No?

Baseball

[Anonymous Coward]

April 11, 1954: Enos Slaughter was traded by the Cardinals to the New York Yankees for Bill Virdon, Mel Wright, and Emil Tellinger (minors).

Re:Doesn't this in fact make it an interesting day

[jc42]

In an infinite set of numbers there does not have to be a minimum number. Suppose all the real numbers were uninteresting. What is the minimum real number?

This is an example of sloppy reporting. The parody proof that "all numbers are interesting" only applies to the so-called "natural numbers", i.e., the numbers used in counting. 1, 2, 3, .... If you leave out that word "natural", you miss the whole point of the proof.

It's yet another example where the humor depends on getting the wording exactly right. OTOH, someone screwing up a joke by not phrasing it quite right is a tradition source of meta-humor. But to do that right, you have to mis-phrase it in the right way.

One of the properties of the natural numbers is that any set of them does contain a least member, under the usual "less than" ordering. If your version of the parody misses this, you've missed the whole point of the joke.

not trues,

[hesaigo999ca]

I am sure all the people born on that day feel otherwise...

followed closely by...

[cdpage]

Monday Nov. 29th 2010 - the day this story was posted.

September 4, 1752

[Anonymous Coward]

I have searched the English and US historical records and nothing appears to have happened. I cannot even determine the day of the week.

Re:September 4, 1752

[SnarfQuest]

The day of the week will depend on many factors, such as which calendar you are using, which may not even have a September, where you are from, and how accurately you have been marking off the days. Back then, there were many competing calenders, and it took a lot to get them aligned.

"Pakistan and Afghanistan Said to Plan Confederat"

[Doc Ruby]

Reported April 11, 1954 New York Times: "Pakistan and Afghanistan Said to Plan Confederation; PAKISTAN PLANS AFGHANISTAN TIE".

Only boring people are bored.

What if...

[John Pfeiffer]

Wouldn't it be amusing if someone, born on that day, having heard this news from someone (A grandson who visits /. for instance), sets out to do something noteworthy? I didn't RTFA but I'm guessing the criteria used included whether or not anyone of note was born that day.

The most boring day ever was a good day

[scourfish]

No smog, no barking from the dog, breakfast with no hog

Sooo...

[Syberz]

These guys grepped wiki's On This Day... database and the day with the least entries is April 11th 1954?

Woopee

Re:Doesn't this in fact make it an interesting day

[Anonymous Coward]

You're assuming that being the least uninteresting number is sufficiently interesting to remove the number from the set of uninteresting numbers. It isn't.

5 through 14 October 1582

[SnarfQuest]

I'll bet that these dates are much more boring than the one suggested, since they never occurred in many countries.

Look up Gregorian Calendar at wikipedia for more details.

Switching from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian one caused these days to be omitted to synchronize the calendar back to the seasons. The people went nuts about losing that many days from their lives, much like the furor over the switch to 2000,

Re:If I remember correctly...

[madprof]

He's not a very strictly observed Jew is he? I don't recall the Ten Commandments allowing people to be polyamorous.

Belgian elections according to Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

The April 11, 1954 Belgian general elections were the fourth Belgian elections after World War II.

Not his fault!

[IdahoEv]

Not his fault. Probably lives in a red state.

Re:Doesn't this in fact make it an interesting day

[jc42]

Well, yeah; that's an important part of the joke. And it's obviously not true for non-mathematicians. ;-)

All numbers are interesting

[blippy]

Old maths puzzle that I heard ages ago ...

THEOREM: All numbers are interesting

PROOF BY CONTRADICTION: Let S be the set of all numbers that aren't interesting. It must have a minimum value, call it n. That being the case, n is quite an interesting number!

QED

Kirk Douglas' Father (1884 - April 11, 1954)

[bgspence]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/windy_valley/4870155079/

EVENING RECORDER
AMSTERDAM, NY
MONDAY, APRIL 12, 1954

HARRY DEMSKY, KIRK DOUGLAS' FATHER, DIES

Harry Demsky, father of Movie Actor Kirk ' Douglas, died last night at the Jewish Home for the Aged in Troy.

Demsky, 70, who came to the United States in 1906, ran a waste metals business in Amsterdam for many years. Following his retirement, he made his home at the Fourth Ward Hotel. He had been living at the home of a daughter in Troy before entering the Jewish Home last Friday.

Kirk Douglas flew east Saturday to visit his father and returned to California early yesterday when it appeared that the sick man was out of immediate danger.

Demsky's widow, Mrs. Bertha Sandler Demsky, is a resident of the Troy Jewish Home