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A comment on Switzerland’s astonishingly polite armed conflict of 1847 (2019). Parent comment

Re:Switzerland’s astonishingly polite armed conflict of 1847... by Biganon on Thursday January 20, 2022 @03:33AM (#30006331)
Also: "Alexandre Emile Jean Yersin (22 September 1863 – 1 March 1943) was a Swiss-French physician and bacteriologist. He is remembered as the co-discoverer of the bacillus responsible for the bubonic plague or pest, which was later named in his honour: Yersinia pestis."
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Re:Switzerland’s astonishingly polite armed conflict of 1847... by kragen on Thursday January 20, 2022 @03:48AM (#30006425)
Ooh, that's pretty important! And that was in 01894. I've probably omitted lots of important things like that.
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Re:Switzerland’s astonishingly polite armed conflict of 1847... by stavros on Thursday January 20, 2022 @06:13AM (#30007407)
Your octal year notation is very much throwing me off.
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Re:Switzerland’s astonishingly polite armed conflict of 1847... by pluies on Thursday January 20, 2022 @07:12AM (#30007899)
That's the notation adopted by the Long Now Foundation (https://longnow.org/) rather than octal, I believe
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Re:Switzerland’s astonishingly polite armed conflict of 1847... by stavros on Thursday January 20, 2022 @09:01AM (#30008974)
Ah, thank you, I was wondering.
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Re:Switzerland’s astonishingly polite armed conflict of 1847... by inglor_cz on Thursday January 20, 2022 @08:47AM (#30008799)
Me too. It is interesting how such a small anomaly in writing can be so annoying and disruptive to the smooth flow of reading.
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Re:Switzerland’s astonishingly polite armed conflict of 1847... by stavros on Thursday January 20, 2022 @09:01AM (#30008985)
My thoughts exactly, I couldn't believe how completely I failed to parse these as dates just because of a tiny leading zero.

I guess it's because dates aren't numbers any more, but names. It would be like adding an "O" in front of every name, like "Ojohn", "Omary".

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Re:Switzerland’s astonishingly polite armed conflict of 1847... by kragen on Thursday January 20, 2022 @01:44PM (#30012863)
Like the Hackaday blog, [stavros]? On some other fora people use @: @stavros.

The powerful effect of such small things can be very thought-provoking.

Interestingly, it's true for me too, even though I've been trying this Long Now date format experiment for a year or so now. I just had to stop myself from writing the Intel 8080 as "08080", suggesting that I'm mentally parsing these dates as "0 1774" and the like.

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