For some time I have been a fan of the Long Now Foundation, a group dedicated to the encouragement of long term thinking.  This may owe a least a bit to the fact that  Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, one of my favorite novels, was inspired by Long Now’s 10000 year clock project.

One of the more idiosyncratic things they do at Long Now is using five-digit dates,  They hope that seeing that leading zero will help people think of a future when the first digit of years is some other numeral.  As a small virtual shout-out, I’ve tweaked my WordPress template to use five-digit dates.  I will acknowledge that it may not fit well visually with the runes and Old English title of my blog, however.