Unique Date
Unique Date
[Cueball speaking to Megan and another Cueball-like guy.] Cueball: Whoa, it's 2014-03-10! Cueball: Under our system, that date will never happen again!! [Caption below the frame:] My Hobby: Pointing this out every day.

In this comic Cueball is excited about the current date and he states this date (the date the comic was released) as 2014-03-10, with the year first, then the month, then the day of the month. This follows the international standard as defined in the ISO 8601 standard. He then continues to point out, to Megan and another Cueball that this date will never happen again.
The Gregorian calendar is the current way to count time in years, months and days. Since time moves only forward, [ citation needed ] dates will never repeat. Every date is thus equally unique, even when the digits aren't in a pattern.
Many people do, however, make a big deal about dates when the digits follow an interesting pattern, such as 2000-01-01 or 2012-12-12. They might plan special events on these "unique" days. For instance, 2007-07-07 was considered a "lucky" day and had a record number of weddings. This is because humans, in general, are superstitious [ citation needed ] and like (and recognize) patterns in everyday life, also including patterns in the numbers used for stating dates. But this does not make these dates more unique than any other dates.
Nevertheless, Cueball has made it into his hobby to point this daily uniqueness out, and having to listen to him, stating this fact every day, would be incredibly annoying to his friends.
The title text refers to the Long Now Foundation , who uses five-digit years (e.g. this comic's date would be written "02014-03-10"). This is an effort to encourage people to think in terms of long-term benefits, rather than only the coming years or decades. The Y2K problem was due to using only two digits to store the year, which would have made dates ambiguous when it rolled from 99 back to 00. Similarly, the Maya calendar had a repeating cycle of 52 years, and even their "long count" rolled over after 7885 years. As we currently use four-digit years this may cause a Y10K problem .
The Long Now Foundation designs a 10,000-year clock that should be able to run for this long — and in principle, it could display every date up to 9999-12-31. 8000 years from the date of the comic would be 10014 AD  — Randall jokes that by switching to 5-digit years, we'd prove the Long Now Foundation correct, although of course by this point there would be no other way to show years except by rebooting the calendar.
A previous comic on date formats was 1179: ISO 8601 .  Randall addresses date formatting confusion again in the title text of 1467: Email .
[Cueball speaking to Megan and another Cueball-like guy.] Cueball: Whoa, it's 2014-03-10! Cueball: Under our system, that date will never happen again!! [Caption below the frame:] My Hobby: Pointing this out every day.
