Today is is the 2nd day of February in the year 2020. And just like any palindrome, this means that it's written the same both forwards and backwards.
Today is a
Palindrome Day!
Palindrome Days are pretty rare, except for the first few centuries of a new Millennium, which is where we currently find ourselves. I was here for the start of this Millennium, but (...since I don't want to make my vampire traits overly obvious and draw the attention of Buffy & Friends...), I doubt I'll be here for the start of the next one.
What makes this one pretty cool, is that it doesn't matter which of the two main maskings you use,
mmddyyyy or
ddmmyyyy, today will be the same. It's also pretty much the only day within my lifetime that the non-ISO date formatting simply doesn't matter.
Since I'm in the U.S., and we want to be different from pretty much everyone else, I commonly see my standard American
mmddyyyy masking. That makes today
02022020. Or if you reverse it, it becomes
02022020.
But say I was looking at today from somewhere that is pretty much the rest of the world. Today is
ddmmyyyy:
02022020.
It still gets to be a palindrome!
It's also the
33rd day of the year
AND there are
333 days left in the year.
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| Geek Overload = 11! |
Since my brain has already exploded, this morning, at
02:02:20 UTC (or your local timezone if you're cheating), we can kick that palindrome out to a time component.
What if we go with ISO-8601 standard formatting:
yyyymmdd. That's
20200202. The digits shift by a character, but we're still a palindrome. We have hit a palindrome date in 3 different formats!
This also makes today a
Global Palindrome Day!
Our last one was
November 11, 1111. I wasn't there for that one either. And our next one won't occur until
12/12/2121. Oddly enough, my son's birthday is
December 12. But that date is slightly above the
Guinness Record for Oldest Person. Who knows. At that point, he'd be over 120 years old. It would be pretty cool to cement a fairly interesting and likely unique Guinness Record.
But, once again, I offer you a very geeky
Happy Global Palindrome Day!
