Over at Coding horror, we have an interesting article about ‘Alphabetical Sorting‘, which is one of those problems that us computer programmers can’t seem to get around. I have one that’s even more evil than that. It’s language-based sorting for names. For example in Irish, we have a lot of bits that get added to the start of names (for example Mac, Mc, O’, D’, h). It’s even more fun than simple numeric sorting. The phone book doesn’t even try on this. I think it has people inured to the fact that they won’t have their name in the right place in the phone book.
If it wasn't for carbon-14, I wouldn't date at all