While the FM-switches and the green-light digits keep in touch with the world outside

[venta]

Well, I promised trivia from The Calendar, and here's the first bit. It's not relevant to anything but it interested me.

Schott's Calendar seems to provide a random burst of information each day, coupled with a note of something completely unconnected which happened on this day in another year. Today it offers me a list of 70s Christmas number ones, and tells me that the first international distress call (CQD) was established in 1904 on Jan 7th.

I'd never heard of CQD before, but found this page on Wikipedia about it. It suggests CQD stood for nothing, but was developed from the radio operators' habit of using CQ to mean "seek you" - so CQD was "Seek You, Danger". Nice to see that applications like ICQ are still sticking to century-old traditions.

My only gripe so far with this calendar is that it doesn't have the day of the week on it, thus leaving me permanently slightly unsure whether I've ripped off the correct number of days, and whether it really is the 7th of January today. The daily trivia is otherwise delightful - and there's something very debonaire about writing one's shopping list on the back of a page listing the horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

... and then instead of being confused about what day it is, I can get confused about whether it's a Newton year or not. "There is no "rule" similar to the current leapyear rule." Pah. Could do better.

And regardless of the ISO Standard, I resolutely refuse to use middle-endian dates. It's silly.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

In what sense are the dates middle-endian?

2003-01-02 meaning 2nd January 2003 progresses neatly from the macro to the micro minutae (or do I mean dayae?).

[venta.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, my mistake - I misread it.
I thought year/day/month was a damn silly thing for ISO to have standardised on.