The United States of American gained its independence from Britian on HPJ4. Humans first landed on the moon on JN7K. The millennium started on K011. What are these strange dates? They are supercompressed dates. Click on the expression to find out what these mysterious dates are and how they can save you space: any date within centuries can be expressed using only 4 characters or bytes. They are good for 8.3 file names and anywhere where space is at a premium.
The potential for a lot of confusion and misunderstandings due to our way of writing dates will start on New Year's Day 2001. Already I have encountered confusion. I looked on a bottle of Starbucks Cappuchino a numbner of years ago and read the expiration date on the bottom: April 3001. Whaaa?? By then even the cobwebs in the bottle will have rotted away. Then I found out what it really meant: April 30, '01. Now if this date had been April 20, it would have read April 2001, causing real confusion. It would have looked like the intended expiration date would have been at the end of 2001 April; i.e., at 2001 April 30/May 1 midnight, ten days removed from the intended date. Read my article The Age of Confusion and use four-digit years and unless sorting is important to you, spell the name of the month.
Welcome to the new Millennium! It started at the beginning of 2000. Click on that to find out why it isn't at the beginning of 2001.
The Year 2000 was the weirdest year of my life, from a calendrical, national, and international perspective. See 2000: The Weird Year for details.
I have been interested in calendars all my life. There are many sort of calendars, including the Western or Christian, the Jewish, the Muslim, the Chinese and others. Most of these are found in a really remarkable compendium of calendars, Calendar Home.
I myself have been intrigued by the concept of a fortnight calendar, to record things that happen every two weeks. Examples are day off in a 5-4-9 work schedule plan and pay check arrival if pay checks come out every two weeks. It would be nice to have a calendar with Payday in it!
There is a rule called the Doomsday Rule by John Horton Conway which can be used to find the day of the week for any date - in your head, no paper required! I have revised this rule to find the day of the fortnight of any date. This is the Doomsday Rule for Fortnights, which you can obtain by clicking those words.