The Washington Times is running a story about how today is an especially unlucky Friday the 13th because the numbers in the date all add up to thirteen. Write out the date in ISO 8601 date format and it’s 2006-10-13. 2+6+1+1+3=13.
Now read that article and see if you can spot the inaccuracies.
Read it? Did you spot the most obvious one, that it’s not 1996? That’s right, according to Heinrich Hemme, the physicist quoted in the article, the last time this happened was January 13, 1520. Or, as it’s put in the article, 476 years ago. Note that 1520+476=1996, not 2006.
I’ll bet most readers didn’t spot the other inaccuracy. It turns out that it wasn’t 476 years since the last double-whammy Friday the 13th. It’s only been nine months. That’s right, January 13, 2006 was a Friday. Write that out in ISO 8601 and it’s 2006-01-13.
The Slashdot summary is rather funny, as it says that “the digits in the numerical notation for the date add up to 13 — whether you write it in the US or the European form.” Imagine that: commutativity under addition holds on both sides of the Atlantic!
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