Today is 2020-02-02, which is 02/02/2020 in the U.S. and 02.02.2020 in Europe. There's a thing going around the Internet today that this is the first time in 909 years that both ways of representing dates have been palindromes on the same date. They put the previous instance as 01/01/1010.
Unfortunately that's not true. This has never happened before, for a few reasons:
- Representing dates as a string of numbers only started, as far as I can tell, in the mid-19th century.
- As recently as the middle of the 20th Century much of Europe would have written the month as a Roman number, e.g. 2.II.2020.
- In the year 1010, the year began sometime in the spring (possibly March 25th under the Julian calendar). So the entire concept of numbering months would have made no sense.
- The United States didn't exist in 1010.
So this is an example of someone noticing a numeric pattern that only makes sense in the modern world and extrapolating that ad absurdam.
If you like palindromes and absolutes that actually do have the same meaning when representing dates in the 11th century as today, you should look at 27 February 2019, which was Julian day number 2458542.