Interesting Links for 16-03-2026

[andrewducker]

1. Royal Mail The Lord of the Rings Stamps

(tags:lotr movies royalmail )

2. UK government to launch £1bn plan to tackle youth unemployment

(tags:unemployment apprentices uk )

3. Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year (I've been using it for over 35 years and had no idea)

(tags:excel date history computers )

4. Scientists create first-of-its-kind 'hexagonal diamond' harder than real thing

(tags:diamonds materials )

Comments

Re: Excel incorrectly assumes that the year 1900 is a leap year

[jack]

Now I looked up what google sheets does and I have no idea.

It seems like in Excel you can literally type in a number and change the cell to a date and see what date it thinks it is. I'm not sure I can believe this, but it seems like "1" is "1 Jan 1900", "0" is "0 Jan 1900", and -1 doesn't display.

Google sheets seems to represent dates in a very similar way except that for some unholy reason, it seems like "2" is "1 Jan 1900", 1 is "31 Dec 1899", and 0 is "30 Dec 1899". And it does use negative numbers to represent older dates. It seems to get leap years correct. I assume it uses gregorian dates indefinitely into the past, ignoring any calendar changes etc. But it seems that 2-693,500.00" is "Apr/4/0001". "-693,600.00" is "Dec/25/0000" (which doesn't exist in regular calendars). And "-694,000.00" is "Nov/21/00-1"!