I could relate a fun story from last summer about 30+ Electronic Arts interns editing a collaborative spreadsheet at the same time (with such important columns as “Do you like things?”,”Are you wearing pants right now?”, and “Are you stuck at work right now?” popping up in real-time). Instead, I’ll relate something I just noticed today–more in the category of Google quirks than anything else (like when Google Maps gives you directions for swimming from New York to Paris). In the spreadsheets, any time you type a date in the form of mm/dd/yy, it automatically converts the 2-integer year into a 4-integer year. Normally I could care less how many numbers are in a date, but it got me thining–is it smart enough to put 1999 if I type 1/22/99? Indeed it is. That got me curious enough that I figured out where the cut-off point is between the 19th century and the 20th century: ‘30. What’s most amusing to me is that there are probably bugs filed for this somewhere and people probably debated what the cutoff should be. I’d probably go with ‘50, personally.
