20 12 2012

Forget the world ending tomorrow, it’s 20.12.2012 today! (at least for those of us in the part of the world that writes dates the sensible way round…)  And in a couple of hours it’ll be 20.12.2012 20:12, which is seriously cool.
I love those sorts of mathematical oddities with dates.  Palindromes (like the 21.02.2012 we had in February) always make me smile, as do days like last month’s 10.11.12 13:14, or this month’s 12.12.12 12:12 (which even the Americans could appreciate).  They mean absolutely nothing, but they’re a cool coincidence.
And we’re rapidly running out of them, for this decade at least.  There’s no 13th month, so we won’t get another repeating date like today’s until next century, on 21.01.2101 21:01. There is a 11.12.13 14:15 next year, but then we hit the 13th month thing again, and have to wait until 2103 for 01.02.03 04:05 (and who wants to get up that early anyway).
There’s no 31st of February, so we won’t get another full palindrome again this decade – the next one is in 2020, on 02.02.2020 (look forward to that one, Americans, because you can celebrate it too!).  Of course, if you ignore the century, and write the single-digit months without a leading 0, there’s a few more palindromic dates to come: 31.1.13, 31.3.13, 31.5.13, 31.7.13, and 31.8.13.  But that feels a bit cheaty, and anyway, because there’s no 41st of any month, they run out again after next year too.