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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."
Incorrect. Open a terminal and type cal 9 1752
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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!
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.
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.