I suppose I’m demanding too much of our local paper. But this bugs me.
11/11/11 is very special to two boys and two moms
Friday will have a date that occurs only once in a century: 11/11/11. Besides being the title of a movie thriller debuting this week, these numbers have significance for many people throughout the world.
It is unarguably true that 11/11/11 happens only once a century. On the other hand, so does 11/10/11. And 11/11/12. Every day of the century, represented this way, happens exactly once per century. That’s the whole point of the mm/dd/yy system, if the same mm/dd/yy meant more than one day it would defeat the whole point. Does it have significance for many people throughout the world? Probably. But it shouldn’t.
Notice that Scott Adams has done something clever here. This joke was not about the typical Y2K scare. The joke couldn’t be based on that, because that was a logical fear, given uncertainty about the technology that used timestamps. So he had to change the topic to have Dogbert claim the world would end, which didn’t match the real fears at the time.
Underlying this post is the idea of separating out numerical features of the measurement system, as opposed to numerical features of the underlying reality. A day is a day, no matter what system we use to indicate it. Daylight savings time does not actually change when the sun rises. A Mayan calender system than runs out in 2012 does not mean the actual world ends. And so on. The world is the world, no matter how we measure it. Features of the measurement system do not change the reality underneath.
Quick Update: I just found an old post on much the same topic.
