It is currently 11:11 on 11/11/11

And now, for a lit­tle bit of unsched­uled programming.

As is obvi­ous, today’s date is Novem­ber 11th, 2011 — styled as 11/11/11 in short­hand, or 11–11-11, or 11.11.11. This will be the only point in our life­times when the date, in short­hand, will have con­sist­ed of mere­ly a sin­gle dig­it that can be read back­wards or for­wards. Con­se­quent­ly, many peo­ple are find­ing it wor­thy of com­mem­o­ra­tion. Live­Science has an inter­est­ing arti­cle about this which I rec­om­mend, if you’re look­ing for some light read­ing today:

[T]he 11:11 phe­nom­e­non is wide­ly report­ed in real life, with entire online dis­cus­sion forums ded­i­cat­ed to fig­ur­ing out what the num­ber means. Peo­ple say they feel haunt­ed by 11s, which appear to them eeri­ly often. To them, the impend­ing date is bound to seem ominous.

On the flip side, some mod­ern-day numerol­o­gists have deemed 11/11/11 aus­pi­cious, and accord­ing to local news sources around the coun­try, an unusu­al num­ber of cou­ples have planned to mar­ry on the day. The num­ber 11 is also a favorite of gam­blers — par­tic­u­lar­ly black­jack and Keno play­ers. So, amid all these alter­na­tive per­spec­tives, what’s the real deal about repeat­ing 11s? Is there any­thing spe­cial about the num­bers lin­ing up?

No. With regards to the 11:11 phe­nom­e­non, rather than being a super­nat­ur­al warn­ing sign, psy­chol­o­gists say it is a clas­sic case of “apophe­nia,” or the human ten­den­cy to find mean­ing or pat­terns in ran­dom­ly occur­ring data. This con­di­tion feeds on itself, because the more con­scious you are of some­thing — such as repeat­ing 11s — the more often you’ll notice it in the world around you, and thus the more cer­tain you’ll become that the pat­tern is real.

This obser­va­tion is cer­tain­ly true. I did­n’t think at all about today’s date (except for today being Vet­er­ans Day) until it was point­ed out to me at it was 11/11/11.

And of course, in our time­zone (as in oth­ers) there’s a point dur­ing the day when the time will also be one dig­it: 11:11::11/11/11. That’s the time now. If we go by a twelve-hour clock instead of a twen­ty-hour hour one, there will be anoth­er 11:11/11/11/11 lat­er today. But on the twen­ty four hour clock, the time and date will only be a sin­gle dig­it for six­ty seconds.