The unpredictable Atlanta weather strikes again. Turned in yesterday night to a cool night and woke up today to grey cloudy skies and raindrops pattering against my window. Truly, Heisenberg would have been pleased (I am probably referring to him out of context, but he's the only person I can think of right now.

Special Time Event Today
There is a special "time event" today evening: the palindromic symmetry of 8:02pm on February 20, 2002, 20:02 on 20/02 of 2002 (2002 2002 2002), using the international date/time notation. It seems that the only other time this has occurred is at 10:01am on January 10, 1001 (1001 1001 1001), and that it will never occur again.After 2112, this event will never occur again because for this trick to work, the first two digits can never be bigger than the 23 hours in a day (22/22 and 23/32 are impossible day/month combinations).Thansk to Jason Kottke for this.

Father Time's Blog also includes a mention of it.

New Google Ad Strategy
There is a post on Slashdot today about Google's new strategy for sponsored rankings. The referenced article is hosted on on Excite.

ITA Software has been posting picture ads on Slashdot for quite a while now for a recruitment puzzle involving add-a-grams, nine 9s, and a mystery M function. There has been some discussion about this on several forums like the comp.lang.python newsgroup and Lambda the Ultimate.

Lambda The Ultimate is 'The Programming Languages Weblog' and contains several interesting threads and posts. They also provide an RSS 0.92 feed.

Just read about ROOT, an object-oriented data analysis framework at CERN. The main page also has a link to CINT, an interpreter for C and C++.

Although the null device hosts links to numerous applications of The Dada Engine, it also has an interesting blog. The main item today was a link to an article in the Boston Herald about the effect of language on human cognition.

The official site for the X-files has a link to a press release about the much-awaited series finale. David Duchovny will return for the two-hour finale (I guess he finally figured out his acting career was going nowhere). He is also confirmed to direct THE X-FILES episode scheduled to air Sunday, April 28 (9:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) based on a story idea he co-wrote with Carter and executive producer Frank Spotnitz.

A posting on comp.lang.python referred to the Collatz Problem. The numbers in the sequence produced by the Collatz are sometimes referred to as hailstone numbers. If this sounds interesting, read more about it at Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics.

Daily Readings for Lent
Jonah 3:1-10
Luke 11:29-32
Both readings, the first from the Old Testament and the second from the New Testament, talk about Jonah and the people of Nineveh.