No more binary days? Do not despair!

If you’re like me you’ve enjoyed the times this year when a date consists of all ones and zeros, called a binary day, and then if you’re really a geek you figure out what the corresponding decimal value would be. But since there aren’t any more this century, and detractors would point out that it didn’t work if you used the 4-digit year, I’ve had to continue my search (did I mention I work in the Information Technology field? Geek Alert.) Enter ternary days!! You can read all about it on Wikipedia, but it solves both problems: it works great with a 4-digit year like 2011 (or 2012!) and provides many more opportunities for ternary dates in the next two years. Ternary is the base 3 numeral system, where each bit can have three values: 0, 1 and 2. That means that today [11222011] would equal 3622 in decimal! I cheated and used a Base-N Calculator I found online.

So there you go: ternary days. Expect a tweet from me on December 1st…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_numeral_system

http://www.efunda.com/units/base_n.cfm?base_from=3