Remember back to July 8th, 2009? Every news reporter on TV and half of the rest of the people were saying “hey, it’s 7,8,9 today!”  Which turned out to have absolutely no significance other than being mildly entertaining for 24 hours.  by 7/9/09 everyone had forgotten all about it.

So how come we notice 7/8/09 but not 11/10/09 (which happened to be yesterday)?  I didn’t hear a single reporter talk about it or bump into anyone that was as excited by this freak occurrence of the calendar.  Surely descending numbers are just as uncommon as ascending -after all we won’t get another one until 12/11/10 and that’s the last one until 3/2/2101.  I don’t know about you but I’ll don’t expect to be here for that last one.  Even a quick web search shows that the only people that really care about this date are Robert and Maria who cared enough to claim the domain for their wedding site, although I doubt they had much competition for it.

So are we just bad at counting backwards or are we somehow wired to prefer numbers that increase moving from left to right?