Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Now we know the first location we can safely visit once time travel is perfected.
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.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Considering the current state of scientific journalism, that is basically all I need to conclude the system does exist.
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.