Saturday, October 31, 2009

  Don't ask me how I came up with this, but I wanted to find a simpler shorter easier way to write the date.  The starting point for any idea is an analysis.  We can write the date 10/31/09,    Oct 31, 2009,   we could include less,  10/2009,   October 2009,   or we could include more,  Saturday, October 31st, 2009,    Sat Oct 31, 2009.
   So here's the idea;   To make a simple and fast form of writing the date that includes the month, day of the week, day of the month and the year,  without any slashes hyphens commas or spaces.  Ok, so 3 out of the 4 things we want to include are represented by numbers, but one is a letter.  The month is one to two digits, 1-12.  The day is also one to two digits, 1-31.  The year can be represented by two or four digits, so we'll use two to make it shorter and simpler. The day of the week is where we get to play around.  I wanted it to be represented by one letter.  Since there are 26 possibilities, we can really do this with no problem.
  Sunday, the first day of the week, so it gets an S.   Monday gets M, Tuesday is the first T of the week so it gets T.  Wednesday gets W, Thursday is the second T of the week, so we'll give it the letter H for the second letter of it's name.  Friday gets F and Saturday naturally gets an A because it is the second letter of it's name and it is the second day of the week beginning with S.  This gives us the letters S, M, T, W, H, F, A.
  Separating the numbers is the next step.  If we start with the month then the day we're left with 103109 if we don't use the day of the week.  This poses a huge problem because tomorrow the date would be written as 11109.  Is it 1/11/09 or 11/1/09?  That doesn't work.  But this does:

  The Result:  10A3109
Separating the two numbers that can change their number of digits sets some ground rules and makes it all work.  If we know that the first number is the month, then 10 is obviously the only possibility for the month, meaning it's October.  The same goes for the day, 31 is the second 2 digit number so it is the day.  The one rule that makes this all work is that the year has to be only 2 digits. (If you're thinking no it doesn't, you're right and you should be the one writing this.  But for the sake of keeping it short we'll leave it as 2.)
  Tomorrow it will be 1S109.  Christmas will be on 12F2509.  And there's the one big downside to it;  in order to write a date sometime in another month, chances are you'll have to look it up to find the day of the week.  So there you have it,  my own way of writing dates.

3 comments:

Rachel said...

Thank you for following my blog, Nate!
What a neat background you have. Very cool.

God bless and have a blessed Lord's day tomorrow!

In Christ,
Rachel M. from Hopejourney

Anonymous said...

Really, Nate... Say, what will happen when we're in 11XX? Like, the next century. :P
My sister always uses six digits. Today would be 011109. ^^

Danaphanous said...

or you could just forget about months and write the date: 301-09

...interesting discussion! ;)