A week or so ago, the date was palindromic, provided one subscribes to the format DD/MM/YYYY that is. There will be another palindromic date in February next year, but then a long wait until the earlier 2030s for more. Will they go on forever? If humanity is still around at the end of the 10th millennium and still keeping track of the days in a similar fashion, it will depend on the new format. If it's DD/MM/YYYYY, then yes, they will continue to the same old irregular way.
By coincidence this morning, I clicked on that seemingly endless source of unpredictable entertainment and bizarre novelty, Greg Ross's Futility Closet website, and discovered some verbal palindromes that were new to me. Mathematicians Peter Hilton and Henry Whitehead, who had been codebreaking colleagues at Bletchley Park during WW2, got into a palindrome exchange in 1947. Whitehead began with STEP ON NO PETS, to which Hilton retaliated with SEX AT NOON TAXES and after a sleepless but very creative night improved upon with DOC, NOTE, I DISSENT. A FAST NEVER PREVENTS A FATNESS. I DIET ON COD. Not surprisingly that 51-letter sequence brought the exchange to an abrupt end. It certainly trumps the old one about the Panama man with his canal.
I met Peter Hilton briefly when visiting the University of Binghamton in the 1990s. He wrote a seminal book on Topology with Shaun Wylie, another Bletchley alumnus, whose inspiring Cambridge lectures on Real Analysis (rigorous Calculus) I was privileged to attend in 1957. While at Binghamton Hilton wrote a charming book with Jean Pedersen connecting algebra to special kinds of paper folding; the title is A Mathematical Tapestry (CUP, 2010, ISBN 0-521-12821-8).
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