Last night, as I was writing in my journal, I realized something special about the date (8/17/18). It’s a palindrome (81718). My next thought was that palindromic dates must occur all the time, so no big deal.
But, after thinking about it for a bit, I came to the conclusion that palindromic dates must be fairly rare. Even if you’re willing to use different date formats (say, using two or four digits for the year, and/or putting a zero in front of a single-digit month or day), there aren’t very many palindromic dates in the average year. For example, I could think of only one for 1996 (6/9/96).
This year, by contrast, has several palindrome days (8/1/18, plus all the dates from 8/10/18 through 8/19/18), and one of them is even a palindrome twice over (8/10/18 and 8/10/2018). So enjoy today and tomorrow, the last palindrome days for the year. And don’t forget to celebrate next year in September, when we will get another nice stretch of them.
P.S. I am willing to use different formats for the date if it will produce interesting numbers, so I’m also looking forward to 02/02/2020.