The Most Boring Day In The 20th Century

Apparently, it was the 11th day of April 1954:

City computer buff William Tunstall-Pedoe has worked out that April 11, 1954 was the most uneventful day in the whole of the 20th century.

Every day something of significance happens, a person is born who is destined for fame, there is an event in the arts or sports, history is created. With 300 million of these facts fed into the “brain” of True Knowledge, Tunstall-Pedoe’s Cambridge company, the computer was asked: “What was the most boring day in the 20th century?”

Unlike a search engine, which finds relevant web pages statistically using key words, True Knowledge is able to reason. ‘Boring’ is a subjective term. A 14-year old has a very different idea of boring to a 45-year old. In this case it used “uneventful” and found the day when nothing much happened.
(…)

“For fun we wrote the program and set it going. When the results came back the winner (or perhaps loser) was April 11, 1954 – a Sunday in the 1950s. Nobody significant died that day, no major events apparently occurred and although a typical day in the 20th century has many notable people being born, for some reason that day had only one who might make that claim: Abdullah Atalar – a Turkish academic.

Well I suppose Mr. Atalar considers it a significant day.
H/T: Gizmodo
FILED UNDER: Open Forum
Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. john personna says:

    Note to self, first time travel trip: April 11, 1954
     

  2. Peterh says:

    Hmmmm…..me thinks Doug’s Saturday has been rather uneventful…..not that that’s a bad thing…..