IN AMERICA, where the month/day/year format for dates makes it less probable to have palindrome dates, today, January 11, is this year’s second palindrome day, a rare thing indeed for Americans.

Palindrome refers to those words which read the same backwards as they do forwards. A common example of a palindrome word can be ‘racecar.’ There are also palindrome sentences, where spaces and punctuation are not taken into consideration.

This year’s first palindrome day was on January 2, when the date in America was 01/02/2010. Today, the date being 01/11/10, is a palindrome day.

But what’s more interesting about today is that today’s date is a binary number. Binary is defined as "a system of numerical notation to the base 2, in which each place of a number, expressed as 0 or 1, corresponds to a power of 2."

So the date, 01/11/10 is a binary number, which adds up to 30 on a binary system converter calculator.