If I recall correctly, so do the Japanese, when they write Western-style dates. Yes, many of them are excellent geeks.

The first thing is that the US are the only people who write a numeric date as Month, Day, Year. The rest of the world writes them as Day, Month, Year.

US: Today is 07/28/2008

Everyone else: 28/07/2008

The second part is more difficult. Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and a few other languages are written and read from right to left unlike European languages, so dates flow in the opposite direction, which mean that even though we use “Arabic” numerals we position them to be read the opposite way.

In Middle Eastern languages today’s date would be written: 8002\70\82.

Of course, the Persian were in at the beginning of the solar calendar movement, so they have their own, more accurate, calendar. Today is 7 Mordad 1387 or 07/05/1387. That would be found in Persian newspapers written 7831\50\07.

For a more complete description try this calendar converter.

I would note that geeks use Year, Month, Day, so we think of today as 2008/07/28.