A bug was reported in the title prettify feature, where dates in the format 1/4/2011 were being incorrectly rendered with magic effects. sam demonstrated the issue and filed a bug report. codinghorror noted that the issue might be due to the default SmartyPants implementation. GiraffeSilver suggested using proper ISO 8601 dates instead.
sam investigated the issue further and found the problem in the Redcarpet gem. A fix was proposed and accepted via pull request 507. However, due to the delay in the stable release, sam decided to implement a pure Ruby version of title prettify, which is now included in the code base. The fix is now live, and the title prettify feature respects word breaks correctly.
Yeah, because David/Gene/Edward does seem like a word break to me. You could specialize it to numbers and say a slash between numbers is not a word break.