The cover of a book. The title is "Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact". Author is Ludwik Fleck. Topic is how it is scientists come to believe a claim is a fact, using as a case study the claim “Syphilis is caused by a bacterium that the Wasserman test detects."

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   Brian Marick (marick@mstdn.social)'s status on Saturday, 15-Feb-2025 08:15:48 JST Brian Marick

   In computers, dates are commonly represented as integer offsets from some fixed date. Nowadays, that "epoch" date is usually January 1, 1970. In Cobol, it was 1875. (Both are semi-arbitrary choices, made for historical reasons.)

   A problem is that there's no way to represent "unknown." But the field has to contain *something*. So Cobol programmers used the epoch, knowing that everyone would know to interpret 1875 as "unknown". (1/6)