This is an archived blog post from andrewt.net . It was originally posted on Tue Jun 01 2010. Depending on which post it is, I might still agree, cringe at the thought of it, agree but think I expressed it like a dick, and/or not have managed to import the formatting.

Pretty impressive, no?

No. This stuff bugs me. Mostly it annoys me for the spectacularly banal observation that “this won’t happen again until the year 3010”. Well, no. What you’ve done there is to truncate the number of centuries from the date, and announce that it won’t reoccur for a century (and in the event you did even that wrong and said it won’t reoccur for a millennium; in fact there’ll be an 05:06:07 08/09/10 in 2110).

That’s true of any date. That’s just the modulo function. There won’t be another 05:06:07 08/09/10 for a hundred years, but then there won’t be another 16:27:05 06/01/10 for a hundred years either and nobody’s impressed by that. Why? Because 16, 27, 5, 6 ,1, 10 doesn’t look like anything much. There’ll be a date and time as remarkable as 16:27:05 06/01/10 later today, say 17:09:42 06/01/10.

But then, 05:06:07 08/09/10 is only a sequence written one particular way. In this case, it’s relying on a rather obtuse American way of writing the date, and even then it only works if you use two-digit years and write the time, including seconds, before the date.

So when will there next be a date and time that’s at least as impressive as 05:06:07 08/09/10? If we allow British dates to be used then we get another 05:06:07 08/09/10 not in 3010, nor even in 2110, but in September. We’ve cut it down from a millennium to a month already.

Moreover, there’s no reason we have to start at 5. We could start at 8, and then wait for 08/09/10 11:12:13, and cut the wait down to slightly over six hours. Indeed, there’s no reason we have to write down the number of seconds, so we could celebrate at 06:07 08/09/10 and get the wait down to an hour and fifty-two seconds.

Exactly 6 minutes and 7 seconds after 5 o'clock on Aug 9th 2010, it will be 05:06:07 08/09/10. This won't happen again for about an hour.

Hands up if you’re still impressed.