Let’s get this out of the way right up front: the American habit of date notation is wrong, wrong, wrong:
An American, a Brit, and a Canadian schedule a business meeting for 02/04/12.
It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but here is how it plays out: The American plans for February 4, 2012. The Brit circles April 2, 2012 in his calendar. And the Canadian? Depends on who you ask.
Written in myriad sequences between slashes or dashes, dates cause what one mathematician calls “maximum confusion.” They cause us to miss meetings and unwittingly eat sour yogurt. They are so prone to mix-ups, in fact, that the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) made a declaration on the subject in 1988.
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‘ISO 8601: Data Elements and Interchange Formats’ espouses year/month/day, abiding by the so-called big endian format, which orders the date from the largest element to the smallest (YYYY/MM/DD). Mr. Kramp chose this format for his bill. The ISO directive, embraced by the UN in its international trade protocols and by the European Union (although not by the individual countries), runs 33 pages.
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And Canada, as Canadians will attest, is one of the worst culprits. Even the Canadian Payments Association, which regulates personal and business cheques, says it accepts day/month/year, month/day/year, and year/month/day, although it requires cheque producers to print guidance letters to clarify the sequencing.
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Some measure of reprieve is around the corner: The year 2013 marks the end of what American mathematician Jim Blowers calls the “Age of Maximum Confusion.”
“After the year 2012, the year can no longer be confused with the month,” he noted on his blog. “But it can be confused with the day. That will be the Age of Great Confusion. For example, 07/11/13 could be 2007 November 13 or 2013 November 7, but not 2007 13-ember the 11th.”
This will go on, he wrote, until 2031, when the day cannot be confused with the month, although the month can still be confused with the day.
It makes sense to use big endian notation (biggest-to-smallest) or even little endian (smallest-to-biggest) but it makes no sense at all to mix up the sequence!
This is one of those games that could attract a lot more attention than the (respectively) 1-6 and 2-5 teams would normally be able to get. The biggest reason is the head-to-head matchup of two rookie quarterbacks, the Vikings’ Christian Ponder and the Panthers’ Cam Newton. 
