The weekend after Thanksgiving/Black Friday is definitely relaxing but also a little boring. But it's not the most boring day in the 20th century. That'd be April 11th, 1954. A scientist developed software to determine that as the boringest day ever.
Why was it so boring!? Well, first of all it was uneventful. Usually in other days, someone famous was born, someone notorious died, or something significant happened. On April 11th, 1954, a Sunday in the 1950's, apparently none of that went down.
The scientist who came up with that date, William Tunstall-Pedoe, used his sophisticated search engine, True Knowledge, to search for the day where no result really popped up. With True Knowledge users can find out what happened on a particular day in history. Here's what he did:
"It occurred to us that we are able to objectively measure the importance of every day in history. Some days are highly eventful and on some days far less happens and we can also objectively estimate the importance of these events.
"For fun we wrote the program and set it going. When the results came back the winner (or perhaps loser) was April 11, 1954 – a Sunday in the 1950s. Nobody significant died that day, no major events apparently occurred and although a typical day in the 20th century has many notable people being born, for some reason that day had only one who might make that claim: Abdullah Atalar – a Turkish academic.
The funniest thing is that the most boring day ever is now somewhat interesting, because of its status as the most boring day ever. So does that mean the 2nd most boring day ever is now the boringest?
[From Gizmodo via Cambridge News via Neatorama]
No comments:
Post a Comment