64 thoughts on “It’s 12/12/12”

  1. Queue up the pedantic commentary about how “12” isn’t a real year, how the calendar is wrong anyway, etc. …

        1. No, logically, if he was never born, how could it be meaningful, so how could it be wrong? It’s more likely both right and wrong, rather than neither.

    2. No quibble with “12” being a real year – very different from the serious objection to saying the third millennium of the calendar began on 01/01/00, implying a first “millennium” of 999 years. (A mistake Oscar Wilde didn’t make when he said correctly that he wouldn’t survive the century, late in 1900.)

    3. I’m old enough to remember 6/6/66. There are always special dates coming along.

      Apparently the registry office in Sydney had to work overtime to cope with all the couples wanting to get married on 12/12/12.

      1. Oakland, California, too: The Alameda County registrars office was packed. People with 12PM appointments had to wait five hours or more to do the actual ceremony thing.

        1. And at Gretna Green, just over the border from England, a popular marriage elopement destination here for historical legal reasons that haven’t applied for years.

      2. Reporters who write this stuff are either innumerate or intellectually lacking in curiosity, and probably both:

        Coyne (presumably copying from that genius reporter) writes:

        “.. won’t happen again until Jan. 1, 2101..”

        This would really mean 1/1/01 in normal shorthand, so completely lacks the required symmetry. Nobody really writes 1/1/1, nor 01/01/01. And if these reporters with serious news on their minds (ha!ha!) had any real curiosity and the slightest ability with numbers, they would just say that this `phenomenon’ (ha!ha!) occurs precisely 3 times near the beginning of each century—10/10/10, 11/11/11 and 12/12/12—so the time till the next is 98 years, not 88, and the whole thing is so trivially predictable as to be beyond boring.

        On the other hand, the respondent I am answering likes “..6/6/66..”. If you loosen the silly rules that far, then is not 2/2/22, less than 10 years from now, the next time? Maybe we need a formal system about this, so the philosophers who write about the logic of the ontological proofs can move on to something new, and even more significant!

      3. I maintain that 18/11/81 (in our notation) was more special than any for a long time, being symmetrical along two axes, with further internal symmetries. I could fold a piece of paper into about 16 and make a paper dolly of it with about three cuts.

    2. The Salt Lake Tribune (sltrib.com) is carrying a story about a birth in Salt Lake City UT at 12/12/12 12:12:12. The time was not recorded to the second, though. ‘Twas caesarian, though: they cheated.
      A local TV station reports another 12/12/12 delivery, at a different time, by an OB named “Dr. Twelves”.

      1. A couple in Christchurch, NZ got married at 12:12:12 on 12/12/12. Easier to arrange than a birth.

        (At least the USA gets the date right for once.)

  3. “The World’s Oldest Woman” died about a week ago – at 120 years old. So, although the odds are way low, someone reading this could be around 1/1/1. Then there are those other low odds: Will they be lucid enough to understand what the big hoopla is all about?

  4. What do you mean I won’t be round then? I am planning on living to be 141 years old. 🙂

    On that note: I reminded my students to vote on election day (kept my political preferences to myself). I told them that they had more at stake than I did; when they got to be my age, there’d be an excellent chance that I wouldn’t be around anymore.

    1. What do you mean I won’t be round then? I am planning on living to be 141 years old.

      Such limited ambitions. [GRIN]
      “Ha, ha, but serious.” I’ve seen repeated comments in respectable sources (the likes of “New Scientist” editorial commentary), that the first person to live to age of 200 (or 500, or 1000) may have already been born. The logic is that general health care and particularly geriatric care is improving rapidly enough that problems will be getting identified and fixed at least as fast as people get older. It may not be true (and we’ll only find out at a rate of 1 year per year), but it’s certainly something that you could have an interesting hour discussing over a pint.

  5. Well, yeah, after having worked on a Year 2000 conversion project for several years I can attest to the foolishness of using two-digit representations of four-digit years. However in practice the problem won’t re-arise for another 80 years or so, and it won’t be my problem.

    Aside from all of that, today is the opening ceremony for the new Museum of Mathematics in New York, most likely just because of that symmetry. (http://www.momath.org)

    1. Thanks for the museum link. Very interesting. Some good videos under “gallery” which I will look at.

  7. I’ve a feeling some monks got their knickers in a twist at the 11th hour on 11 11 1111. (Much checking of sundials and gnashing of teeth)

    1. There are more shopping days in other parts of the world where dates are expressed a little differently…

      1. Like Ethiopia and Eritrea, who have 13 months in their year. So the next big deal there can be 13/13/13. [Except that 12/21 thing is going to spoil it for everybody, right?].

      2. other parts of the world where dates are expressed a little differently

        Arrgh!
        I’ve only got one thing to say to you (and the rest of the universe) : ISO-8601.
        I had a lovely couple of months on a job including reporting for a French oil company with an American catalogue of previous wells drilled on the structure. The French people wanted their reports with DMY formatting ; the Americans wanted reports (including file names) in MDY format. The drilling people wanted their reports (for pressure control – what got fscked-up on the Deepwater Horizon) in metres, but the geology department wanted their reporting in feet (for compatibility with the existing corpus of data). And all to the continuous mournful tolling of the Piper Alpha’s wreck buoy.
        ISO-8601 is my default, and only gets changed on the written request of the client. Anything else is storing up problems for the future.
        Here endeth standard rant # 47.

  11. Could have mentioned this yesterday your time as now I have missed out our time. If you don’t hear from over here in 8 days (9 of yours) you had better assume the worst has happened and is coming your way

  12. On my computer I typed:

    date -u

    and the response was:

    Wednesday 12 December 23:27:05 UTC 2012

    This date will never be repeated! Too bad for all those folks who missed it …

  14. On the question of the coming eschaton, I was asked this by a pleasant, none-too-bright, but credulous 12 year-old tutee of mine the other day. I was happy to respond that this prediction ‘has not been accepted by mainstream scholarship’, as your link says. Professional lingo for boll*%ks. Still, I hope I stilled the lad’s nightmares; no doubt, he’ll be into Velikovsky and von Daniken in five years’ time. Happy mid-Advent, everyone!

    4. Can someone explain this? I goggled it, but all I got was oblique references to the date. Why should one day be better than any other for checking microphones? Or is that the joke?

      1. “one two, one two, one two…”

        What someone says into a microphone while the sound guy gets the volume right.

  17. 12-12-12. Indeed.

    A good day to get a job offer!

    (Does a brief happy dance. Very brief.)

      1. Off topic, Ichthyic, but this on Obama and the Southern Strategy from Le Monde Diplomatique English edition, Dec 2012:

        “http://mondediplo.com/2012/12/05usa”

  18. I am getting damned tierd of storing up food that evangelists keep selling me on T.V. Just in case the religious prediction is a few years in error. Is there some pecuiary reason there? It seems there is. Because that evangelist woman keeps, I forgot her name, flying around in a million some dollar jet to travel five thousnd miles to eat breakfast. Are her religious followers missing something here?

    1. Her followers are missing the 5,000 mile trips, and the fancy breakfasts. Meanwhile, the evangelist lady is laughing all the way to the bank.

  19. uh, here in the future it’s already 12-13.

    nothing interesting happened yesterday.

    oh, I got a sunburn, and drank some beer.

    does that count?

    If you want, you can send me 5.00 to subscribe to my “visions of the future” newsletter, and I will tell you if the world really does end on the 21st. you’ll get a full day’s notice if you live on the East Coast of the US!

  20. BUT next week will be 20/12/2012 – at least in the UK!

    And at 12 past 8 in the evening, 20:12 20/12/2012…

      1. You can argue that Year:Month:Day is the most logical overall, with successive digits representing smaller units, i.e. in the same way we normally write numbers.

        But only a fool and a communist would use Month:Day:Year.

      1. If they think getting you to put their birthday up means they will get prezzies from all the WEIT readership, forget it!

  23. You’re a traitor to your own culture. Wasn’t 12/12/12 actually 28th Kislev, 5773? No magic there.

    Or is it really 28 Muharram, 1434 AH? or perhaps 22 Azar, 1391 SH?

    Or is it 5113 KE?

    Who cares?

  24. The world end in nine days? It ended 10 months ago – the Mayans didn’t know about leap year…

Comments are closed.