Date your data - "Unique Dates"

Another week has passed us by. And quite a few may not have noticed something unique about last week.

Last Thursday was an interesting day from a numerological point of view. If we express the date as dd-mm-yy eg 12-12-24, 09-04-24 etc then the day before yesterday i.e Thu is the last day for this century where

• dd = mm part of date and 
• dd + mm = yy

because there are no month values >12. So there have been 12 such dates, 1st Jan 2002, 2nd Feb 2004, 3rd Mar 2006, 4th Apr 2008, 5th May 2010, 6th Jun 2012, 7th Jul 2014, 8th Aug 2016, 9th Sep 2018, 10th Oct 2020, 11th Nov 2022, and 12th Dec 2024.

So I thought instead of New Year resolutions or Birthday resolutions, why not keep a marker for this last unique date 12th Dec 2024 and try to change myself, say give up a bad habit or improve a skill, declutter my mind from negativity etc. One of the reasons why New Year resolutions or Birthday resolutions don't work is the same event would appear again the next year. But Unlike birthdays/ new years, this unique arrangement of numbers for the date may not occur again during our lifespan since the next such event would only be in the next century. i.e. 01-01-2102.

Below shows a short code snippet in R programming language that prints these dates:-

and this is the output obtained. There are 36525 days in a century.

Trivia : - Symmetric Timestamps:

If we express in from 21st century as dd-yy-mm hh:mm:ss , and if all the values from the 1st "d" to the last "s" are equal such a symmetric timestamp has been used in the recent past for a major event. The number 8 is considered "lucky" in Chinese culture since its pronunciation “Ba” sounds similar to the word “fa”, which means to make fortune. So during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, China inaugurated the Opening Ceremony at exactly 08-08-08 08:08:08 PM. This is the symmetric timestamp that was of significance. The last such for this century has already passed us a decade back at 12-12-12 12:12:12 PM.

Manipulating dates and times is an important skill in Data Science. Messy date cleaning, date extraction,  getting prev month/ next month, grouping by month-year these are essential skills.

Here's a cheatsheet of datetime in R by Datacamp.

https://www.datacamp.com/cheat-sheet/dates-and-time-in-r-cheat-sheet