Comment by kragen
Comment by kragen 5 days ago
well, 01935, not 01835. not a lot of paraguayan businesses from 01835 survive thanks to the war of the triple alliance
Comment by kragen 5 days ago
well, 01935, not 01835. not a lot of paraguayan businesses from 01835 survive thanks to the war of the triple alliance
This is valid (if somewhat obscure) notation for decimal dates in particular, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation
It's a stupid notation:
> the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem
That just sets you up for the year 100,000 problem. The objectively better idea is to just parse years as regular integers, something that I'm confident people will figure out in the remaining 8 millennia until the problem actually hits.
It's true that they say that:
The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.
but the truth is more subtle, love it or hate it the five digits are part of a campaign to encourage people to think about humans in timescales a tad longer than a few decades at most.
How does promotion by a single non-profit talking shop, however celebrated or intellectual were its founders, make it a "valid notation"?
Five digits don't even make sense in practical anthropic terms, since we're obviously headed for a shitload of trouble long before the hundreds digit next wraps.
Ack, yes, I meant 1935. I'm on mobile and typoed that in a way the spell checker couldn't catch...
Even now in the US I have yet to see Disney selling rice under the Mickey Mouse brand in a way that could be at all confused with the Mickey rice in Paraguay that I grew up with.