62 thoughts on “Happy Palindrome Day”

  1. Ah, Americans always late? We had our palindrome day in February already…
    (just kidding, no anti-americanism intended 😉 )

  2. I well remember palindrome day back in February! We in the rest of the world will have another fun day on 20th of November – 20/11/2011! 😉

    1. and that’s a day they can’t have in America
      even their clocks are behind… Which is why I reckon in Japan they love their robots so much, they’re way off in the future 🙂
      haha

    2. I well remember the great Pailindrome days of the 12th century when I was a lad – 1/11/1111, then there was the unforgettable 11/1/1111!

      Sorry!
      🙂

      1. I remember my maths teacher getting very excited on 18th November ’81 – palindromic, mirror symmetric (top-bottom and left-right) and rotational symmetry to boot. Americans don’t know what they’re missing!

        2. Yes, I gut excited about that one. I remember folding a piece of paper in 16 and somehow cutting out a short straight segment and a quarter circle to unfold into it.

    3. and of course the rest of the world will get another one next year on 21/02/2012. Which makes no sense in the US.

    1. My favourite is “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama”.

      The Remembrance Day service this year is at 11:11 on the 11th of the 11th 2011. – 11:11 11/11/11.

      Buy a poppy.

      Cheers,
      Norm.

      1. And this one is true all over the world, albeit in a semicircular swathe sweeping around the world. We call it Armistice Day.

  4. Oh please give up all your false date formats for the one true as defined by ISO 8601, and ye shall be saved.

    1. I agree.

      Fortunately, today is a palindrome in both the wrong (American) date format: “11/02/2011” and the right way to write dates: 2011-11-02.

      1. The typical European date format is even more wrong for sorting than the American format.

        Neither is designed for machine sorting, however, but to reflect how dates are actually spoken.

        A German would say today is “zwei November”, and so writes 02.11.2011. An American says “November second”, so writes 11/02/2011.

        It’s that simple. To say either format is “wrong” is nothing but smug attempted pedantry.

        1. @ Thanny,

          It’s not ‘smug pedantry’ when you date your Cheque to me as “02-01-2012” & I am not able to figure out whether I can cash it in January or February. (Worse yet, your other cheque to me dated 11-09-12 could be any of three different dates…) I call the US office about my broken widget with its one year warranty. My warranty receipt is dated 01-12-2010, but the US office thinks that I bought the Widget a year ago last January. That’s a problem.

          Using numbers to emulate speech is not nearly as sensible as using numbers to quantify a numeric value according to normal mathematical conventions. Your Odometer makes good numerical sense; your speech doesn’t.

          The ISO standard makes sense because it is unambiguous and adheres to good mathematical conventions. The world would be a little better place if we all recognized that ambiguous numerical dating conventions should be thrown onto the same pile of out-of-date conventions like measuring both volume and weight with units like “Ounces” or using “Pints, Quarts and Gallons” without qualifying whether you mean US or Imperial. These archaic systems are clumsy and far too colloquial. In the interest of clear communication, let’s just move on.

          -evan

          1. I dunno shit about ISO standards, but putting the most significant bits first is obviously right for dates, just as it is for all other forms of numerical representation. Also, it makes file names sort correctly on my computer. So happy 2011.11.02!

          3. I don’t disagree that there are good reasons for a standard date format, especially when dealing with stored information that may cross borders of convention.

            But if you have a “cheque”, it wasn’t written in the US, and won’t be dated as MM/DD/YYYY.

            Being able to deduce the correct meaning of a token based on context is pretty basic stuff. If you’re trying to cash a check in the US, it’s safe to say that 02-01-2012 is February 1, 2012.

            Likewise, if the time is given as “seven thirty”, you need to know that the US has a convention for using 12-hour time segments, labelled AM and PM, and that the fact that it’s dark out is pretty good evidence for it being 19:30 on a 24-hour clock.

            These same basic faculties are what let us know whether something that’s “light” is not heavy, or not dark (or not chock full of calories).

            Yes, there’s still room for ambiguity, and it can sometimes cause problems. But if you think presenting a lecture on ISO standards will have any effect on long-standing conventions of an entire population, you’re kidding yourself. And behaving smugly.

          4. @Thanny who wrote:
            “But if you have a “cheque”, it wasn’t written in the US, and won’t be dated as MM/DD/YYYY.”

            (Try and explain that on the phone to a US clerk from North Carolina when they think you’ve post-dated the cheque… One would have to be pretty stupid to use an unqualified format for something like that.)

            This is not a region specific problem though. Some of us live in a not-so-uniform, multicultural world where people use multiple conventions without explanation. Here in Canada, people use both conventions of dd/mm or mm/dd interchangeably without clarification. (Some are perhaps more influenced by the conventions of our neighbour to the South.) When I shop locally, the receipts from purchases are just as likely to use the US convention as the European format.

            Not only are there potential misunderstandings with this situation but it is simply a hassle to have to constantly convert formats. To submit my professional billings to our Socialized medical Services Plan I am obliged by the Gov’t software to use the mm/dd/yyyy format as I read the dates from the Gov’t-funded hospital records which are coded in ddMMMyyyy. It’s just nuts.

            Yes, many of us like amateur detectives, have figured out that Americans are likely using the mm-dd-yyyy format but it ain’t always so simple. It is an issue & a quite unnecessary source of confusion.

            The sooner we can all agree that ambiguity in numeric datings is stupid, the sooner we can move onto an unambiguous standardized format that can’t be misunderstood.

            -evan

          5. I eagerly look forward to 2013 (assuming the world doesn’t end as promised in 2012) since it will significantly reduce date ambiguity both in quantity and quality (and it gets even better in 2032…). I recently had some soup that had an expiry date of 12-07, so either it was good until the middle of next year, or it had been in my cupboard a *really* long time, and was already 4 years gone.

          6. Thanny, I’m an American and even I think our system is dumb. We should be using 24-hour time, most-significant to least-significant date ordering (not the European system, either), and SI units. Yes, it’s hard to change the behaviors of a whole population, but other countries have survived the metric switch and I’m pretty sure we could survive more widespread official adoption of these conventions as well. It doesn’t even have to be a big government mandate on social behavior — rather, if the government simply starts requiring *itself* to use these conventions, the rest of us will follow along eventually. The only reason it hasn’t happened yet is inertia/indifference. But it should happen, and I expect it will eventually.

          7. Oh, I largely agree. I use 24-hour time myself whenever possible, largely because I have no constant schedule, and there have been several occasions where it’s taken me a minute to figure out whether the time was 06:00 or 18:00.

            I don’t have an intuitive grasp on metric units, but would happily force myself to develop one if a switch was made.

            Regarding the date format, I disagree strongly that the US is the outlier, and to blame for ambiguity. Nations that place the day before the month are just as culpable. The ordering of the numbers in a standard format doesn’t matter for human use. Using year-month-day is a convenience for computer programmers (such as myself), who can use text-based sorting instead of parsing the date into components. Provided, of course, that the values are zero-padded.

            I don’t pretend to know what it would take for 7 billion people to all use the same methods for writing down times, dates, and measurements. I just find it amusing whenever someone pontificates about it, as if that’s the answer.

          8. Thanny, I didn’t say that the U.S. is an outlier, although perhaps the original poster may have meant to call us out for that. Thing is, I don’t really care if we are or not. What I do care about is that what we do right now is dumb, and we should do things better regardless of what everyone else does.

  8. Forgive me…but
    one of my pet peeves is the use of numeric dates in any of the formats:

    dd/mm/yy
    mm/dd/yy
    yy/dd/mm
    dd/mm/yyyy
    mm/dd/yyyy

    as they can easily represent more than one date depending on the nationality or proclivities of the reader. (It drives me crazy.)

    There is only one format that is not going to be misconstrued:
    yyyy/mm/dd

    It would, by the way, still qualify for your Palindrome day today: 2011/11/02

    Let’s start a world wide effort to change to this format – shall we?

    -evan

      2. Thanks for that reference b&,

        I see that I have been violating the rules with my yyyy/mm/dd & should be writing it as yyyy-mm-dd. I will have to mend my ways.

        -evan

      3. The Canadian federal government adopted ISO 8601 some time ago. Rare is the Canadian that is aware of that, unless they do business with the feds.

        As with many things, our southern neighbours corrupt our attempts to join the rest of the world in using sensible standards. Wishy washy Canadians can expect to see any of these date standards used in their news media or correspondence, often more than one implementation in the same document.

        The nice thing about having so many different standards is that you get to chose the one you like best!

  9. My favorites:

    ‘T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating is sad. I’d assign it a name: “gnat, dirt upset on drab pot toilet.”‘

    ‘Mirth, sir, a gay asset? No! Don’t essay a garish trim.’

    The masterpiece, though, has always been the well known:
    ‘A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.’

    Not only does it more sense than most other palindromes, but it has a lovely, simple dramatic directionality that is enhanced by the fact that each noun is one letter longer than the last.

  11. The REST of the world is trying very hard to learn English. Wouldn’t be nice if the americans tried to learn the metric system and how to write dates in a way that makes sense? Just to return the favor, y’know.
    (This is a joke, btw)

  12. Just one thing… The US military uses that DD/MM/YYYY notation. So there is a substantial population the in the US who recognize it. Furthermore, we often used metric systems for measurements, especially when cooperating and collaborating with our international counterparts. (Ammunition is often rendered as (N)mm. Caliber is for the old farts. And we drink liters of beer, not fluid ounces.)
    And to beat the horse into dust – Veterans Day is for those of us who served and survived, Memorial Day is for those who served and died, and Armed Forces Day is for those still serving.

    1. Onkel…

      That’s interesting to see that the US Military uses a more universal convention. The problem is that when used without qualification, a date written as 02/04/2011 could be 02 April or Feb 04. Like the odometer on a car it makes a lot more sense and is not likely to be misinterpreted if the 2011/04/02 conventions were used instead.

      -evan

      1. That and NATO. When all of your allies use metric, it’s easier for you to adapt to them rather than trying to make them all adapt to you, especially when it’s not really that important an issue.

    3. Ammo is confusing. NATO standard issue rounds are listed in metric (9x19mm, 5.56x45mm, 7.62x51mm). But other common rounds pretty much always given in caliber: e.g. .40 S&W, .45 ACP, .50 BMG (not 10x22mm, 11.43×23mm, or 12.7×99mm).

      1. Caliber is a ratio describing the bore and length of a gun barrel. The ammunition uses measurements, so with NATO, that means metric.

  14. 11-02-2011 (or 2011-11-02 if you prefer) qualifies as an upside down date (or rotationally symmetric) under the new millenium digital digit display rules, in which 2 rotates into a 2.

  18. The best ever is in Latin:

    Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas.

    It means something like “Arepo the sower holds the wheels at work,” though my source tells me there is no fully authoritative translation.

    Anyone there who knows Latin better than I do, and can give a more accurate translation?

    The beauty of it is that not only is it a perfect palindrome but the first letter of each word spells out the first word, and so on.

    To get something like this in English would appear very difficult.

  19. If you like palindromes, read The Poisonwood Bible. Actually, just read The Poisonwood Bible anyway.

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