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While we are at it, let’s all (as in the entire planet) switch to 24hour UTC and the YYYY.MM.DD date format.
ISO8601 gang
Some ISO8601 formats are good, but some are unreadable (like 20240607T054831Z for date and time).
The ones without separators tend to be for server/client exchange though.
I agree but they’re hard to read at a glance when debugging and there’s lots of them :)
Having said that, a lot of client-server communications use Unix timestamps though, which are even harder to read at a glance.
At least it’s human readable and not protobuf 😬 * though the transport channel doesn’t really matter it could be formatted this way anyhow.
I mean I like this one without the separations
Seconded.
That’s good for file/record sorting, so let’s just use it for that
For day to day, DD.MM.YY is much more practical.
For day to day, DD.MM.YY is much more practical.
It’s not though… It’s ambiguous as to if the day or month is first. With the year first, there’s no ambiguity.
If you want to use d-m-y then at least use month names (eg. 7-June-2024).
It’s ambiguous as to if the day or month is first.
Not if everyone is using it, as they should.
Besides, so is is yours. 2024.06.07 could be the 7th of June or (if you’re an American and thus used to the months and days being in an illogical order) 6th of July.
As for writing out the month names, that’s no longer shorthand. That’s just taking more time and space than necessary.
Au contraire! With a three character month, period separation isn’t needed, and the date is shorter. (Admittedly there’s likely to be a language translation issue, depending on audience.)
Hard disagree.
Least specific -> most specific is generally better in spoken language as the first part spoken is the part the listener begins interpreting.
Like if I ask if you’re free on “the 15th of March” vs “March 15”, the first example is slightly jarring for your brain to interpret because at first it hears “15th” and starts processing all the 15ths it’s aware of, then “March” to finally clarify which month the 15th is referencing.
The only thing practical about DD.MM.YY is that it is easier for the speaker because they can drop the implied information, or continue to add it as they develop the sentence.
“Are you free on the 15th” [oh shit, that’s probably confusing, I meant a few months from now] “of July” [oh shit, I actually mean next summer not this one] “next year (or 2025)”.
So the format is really a question of who is more important in spoken language: the speaker or the listener? And I firmly believe the listener is more important, because the entire point of communication is to take the idea you’ve formulated into your head, and accurately describe that idea in a way that recreates that same idea in the listener’s head. Making it easier for the speaker to make a sentence is pointless if the sentence itself is confusing to the listener. That’s literally a failure to communicate.
You’re confusing your own familiarity and experience with a general human rule.
My mother tongue (Portuguese) has the same order when saying numbers as English (i.e. twenty seven) and indeed when I learned Dutch it was jarring that their number order is the reverse (i.e. seven and twenty) until I got used to it, by which point it stopped being jarring.
The brain doesn’t really care beyond “this is not how I’m used to parse numbers” and once you get used to do it that way, it works just as well.
As for dates, people using year first is jarring to me, because I grew up hearing day first then month, then year. There is only one advantage for year first, which is very specifically when in text form, sorting by text dates written in year-month-day by alphabetical order will correctly sort by date, which is nice if you’re a programmer (and the reason why when I need to have a date as part of a filename I’ll user year first). Meanwhile the advantage of day first is that often you don’t need to say the rest since if you don’t it’s implied as the present one (i.e. if I tell you now “let’s have that meeting on the 10th” June and 2024 are implied) so you can convey the same infomation with less words (however in written form meant to preserve the date for future reference you have to write the whole thing anyway)
Personally I recognize that it’s mainly familiarity that makes me favour one format over the other and logically I don’t think one way is overall better than the other one as the advantages of each are situational.
Meanwhile the advantage of day first is that often you don’t need to say the rest since if you don’t it’s implied as the present one (i.e. if I tell you now “let’s have that meeting on the 10th” June and 2024 are implied) so you can convey the same infomation with less words (however in written form meant to preserve the date for future reference you have to write the whole thing anyway)
That advantage is not exclusive to the date-first system. You can still leave out implied information with month-first as well.
Personally I recognize that it’s mainly familiarity that makes me favour one format over the other and logically I don’t think one way is overall better than the other one as the advantages of each are situational.
This is the biggest part of it. No one wants to change what they know. I’m from the US and moved to the UK, and interact with continental Europeans on a daily basis. I’ve seen and used both systems day to day. But when I approach this question, my answer isn’t “this one is better because that’s the one I like or I’m most comfortable with”, my answer is “if no one knew any system right now, and we all had to choose between one of the two options, which one is the more sensible option?”
dd-mm-yyyy has no benefit over yyyy-mm-dd, while yyyy-mm-dd does have benefits over dd-mm-yyyy. The choice is easy.
The minimal or non-existent benefits for most people in most situation of yyyy-mm-dd (no, the brain doesn’t need the highest dimensional scale value to come first: that’s just your own habit because of how numbers are spoken in the English language and possibly because the kind of situation where you use dates involves many things which are further than a year forwards or backwards in time, which for most people is unusual) - people sorting dates by alphabetical order in computer systems (which is where yyyy-mm-yy is the only one that works well) is just the product of either programmer laziness or people misusing text fields for dates - so don’t add to enough to justify the “jarring” for other people due to changing from the date format they’re used to, not the mention the costs in anything from having to change existing computer systems to having to redesign and print new paper forms with fill-in data fields with a different order.
In a similar logic, the benefits of dd-mm-yyyy are mainly the ease of shortenning it in spoken language (i.e. just the day, or just the day and month) and depend on knowing the month and year of when a shortenned date was used (which usually doesn’t work well for anything but immediate transfer of information as the month and day would still need to be store somewhere if they’re not coming from “present date”) so they too do not justify the “jarring” for other people due to changing from the date format they’re used to.
Frankly even in an imaginary situation were we would be starting from scratch and had to pick one, I don’t know which one would be better since they both have flawed advantages - year first only really being advantageous for allowing misusing of text data fields or programmer laziness in computer systems whilst day first only being advantageous in immediate transfer of date information where it gives the possibility of using a shortenned date, something which is but a tiny gain in terms of time or, if in a computers system or written form, storage space.
It’s really not a hill worth dying on and I only answered your point because you seemed to be confusing how comfortable it felt for you to use one or the other - a comfort which derives from familiarization - with there being some kind of general cognitive advantage for using any order (which, in my experience, there is not).
if I ask if you’re free on “the 15th of March” vs “March 15”, the first example is slightly jarring for your brain to interpret
Sounds like you’re just used to it being said the opposite (read: wrong) way. If you told someone in my country March 15th, it would be just as jarring to the listener.
at first it hears “15th” and starts processing all the 15ths it’s aware of, then “March” to finally clarify which month the 15th is referencing.
not in daily use. When you ask someone “what day is it today?”, they usually have a handle on what month it is and just need the day. For making plans, it’s only if you make them way in advance that you need the month first, which would be sorting and scheduling, not daily use.
When you ask someone “what day is it today?”, they usually have a handle on what month it is and just need the day.
You’re still allowed to exclude implied information, no matter which method of dating you want to go with. You can just say “the 15th”.
For making plans, it’s only if you make them way in advance that you need the month first, which would be sorting and scheduling, not daily use.
I can’t speak for you, but for me I am making plans, sorting, and scheduling every single day.
I can’t speak for you, but for me I am making plans, sorting, and scheduling every single day
Sounds exhausting tbh, I’m sorry…
Americans use 9 millimeters at school all the time.
How many football fields is that
About 82 nanofields
What’s the ratio of nanofields to millimeters?
About 82 to 9
There is a business opportunity there for 0.35 inches Freedom Guns
Hilarious.
I am once again asking for yyyy-mm-dd
ISO8601 crew represent!
I get SO frustrated when I see a date like 4/3/2024 and have to spend time trying to figure out if it’s the 4th of March, or if some US company wrote the software I’m using and it has defaulted to silly format.
Try working for an American company while not living in America. I have spent years trying to convince my US colleagues to please use unambiguous date formats when sending email to a global audience. But no… they just can’t see why it would be necessary or even helpful to do that.
I’ll take metric gladly, but I can’t go that direction sir.
As a mechanical design engineer in America having dual systems creates unnecessary complexity and frustration and cost for me all day every day. I full force embrace switching to metric
Metric yes please. Also for fucks sake use the 24 hour clock. Some of us learned it from the military but it’s just earth time and way easier than adding letters to a number
the 24 hour clock
I switched to it in my later teens when I realised how many cases it would be better in.
Conversion during conversation might be an extra step, but I’ll be pushing for the next generation to have this by default.Also, much better when using for file names.
Also, YYYY-MM-DD. There’s a reason why it is the ISO
The conversion is pretty much the only hurdle I ever hear about, but that’s easy enough. How many songs/films talk about “if I could rewind the last 12+12 hours”…it’s just a matter of making it fit in context people can understand when they know a day is 24 but are used to 12.
ISO and while we’re at it, the NATO phonetic alphabet for English speakers. “A as in apple B as in boy” means fuck all when you’re grasping for any word that starts with that letter, and if English isn’t your first language fuckin forget about it.
ISO and while we’re at it, the NATO phonetic alphabet for English speakers. “A as in apple B as in boy” means fuck all when you’re grasping for any word that starts with that letter, and if English isn’t your first language fuckin forget about it.
err… didn’t get what you’re trying to say
We standardized an alphabet among all countries for clear communication.
Here is an example of it going wrong.
I’m pretty sure that’s an example of why you should use the chosen ones instead of going “mancy/nancy” all over the place.
Also, didn’t they just make a standard for themselves and other just took it because it was probably easier than making one for their own language (oh right, NATO… but let’s be honest here, NATO is just a forum for America to flaunt its power while PR-ing peaceful, so it makes sense they use English, which is also easier to be a second language than most other ones).
Though I feel like China might have made their own.
The radio words were chosen to be distinct, such that for people who trained in them, it would be easier to distinguish letters being spoken over low quality radio.
Not very relevant in the era of 2G HD audio, and now VoLTE.
But when there’s a bad signal and you have to tell someone a callsign, it makes sense.
I like ISO, because in whatever cases I have interacted with it, it has made programming easier for me.
I like YYYY-MM-DD, because when files lose their metadata, if they are named using this, I can still sort by name and get results by date.
Conversion during conversation might be an extra step
Conversion is always extra step, but you don’t need it if you use same timezone as other participant.
Also, YYYY-MM-DD. There’s a reason why it is the ISO
Big-endian is big. Alternatively DD.MM.YYYY or DD.MM.YY for little-endian lovers.
Except no because the digits themselves are still big-endian. That’s nUxi.
It’s more along the lines of most signigicant bit/least significant bit, rather then byte order.
Right, and the most significant bit of the whole date is the first Y in YYYY, which we can’t put at the end unless we reverse the year itself. So we can either have pure big-endian, or PDP-endian. I know which one I’m picking.
Your literal statement is also just wrong. The solitary implication of endianness is byte ordering, because individual bits in a byte have no ordering in memory. Every single one has the exact same address; they have significance order, but that’s entirely orthogonal to memory. Hex readouts order nybbles on the same axis as memory so as not to require 256 visually distinct digits and because they only have two axes; that’s a visual artefact, and reflects nothing about the state of memory itself. ISO 8601 on the other hand is a visual representation, so digit and field ordering are in fact the same axis.
Every single one has the exact same address; they have significance order, but that’s entirely orthogonal to memory.
We are talking about transferring data, not storing it. For example SPI allows both for LSb-first and MSb-first. In date digit-number-date is like bit-byte-word.
Right, and in data transfer every byte can be placed in an absolute order relative to every other. And the digits within the respective fields are already big-endian (most significant digit first), so making the fields within the whole date little-endian is mixed-endian.
I have iterated this several times, so I worry there’s a fundamental miscommunication happening here.
The 12 hour one is just so wildly dumb and inconsistent.
Why does it go from 11 AM to 12 PM to 1 PM?
Why no base10 clock?
You don’t need to add or multiply time very often. Division is super important tho, and base60 is better than base10 for that.
Too easy. Plus we put in the 3/5 “compromise” so you can’t expect old white racists to learn proper math
The French did try it back when they were in the process of changing to the metric system in the 1700s. Even THEY quickly determined that, much like the creation of the universe, it was a very bad idea. And it was very quietly dropped. French tried hard to scrub that moment of insanity from the history books. But well, the internet is truly forever in both directions I guess.
Metric time quickly got out of sync with the periods of light and dark. Mother Nature evidently doesn’t like humans dicking around with the time periods of her celestial movements. (Dozenal for the win!)
Why would you demand metric everything and not metric time?
Cause then we’d be thinking we’re monkeys on a spherical rock in a vacuum instead of calibrating clocks to a radioactive element to make sure everyone tunes in to wheel of fortune on time while this oblate spheroid tumbles around
Also, it’s hard enough getting people to equate Km and C with known quantities, Americans can’t handle base unit shifts like that
Cause then we’d be thinking we’re monkeys on a spherical rock in a vacuum instead of calibrating clocks to a radioactive element to make sure everyone tunes in to wheel of fortune on time while this oblate spheroid tumbles around
Just a little sodium chloride
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If America is going to go through the trouble to convert everything to metric, might as well switch to base 10/decimal time as well lol
I love the 24 hour clock and living in London, UK I used it all the time. However, I remember one time I bought movie tickets at lunch for 17:30 and my brain thought it was for 7:30pm and I called my friend at the last moment saying: “you have to leave work early if we’re gonna make it!”
There was a beautiful time back when I was young where we tried to change to metric and schools taught us nothing but. Now I’m ~50 years old and don’t even know how many pints are in a gallon. Or feet in a mile. Always forget whether it’s 12 or 16 that’s inches in a foot / ounce to pound. Always have to look that shit up. Because they didn’t teach us that garbage. Ever.
Guess what I NEVER have to look up? The measurements that tell you in their fucking prefixes how many X are in Y. What a concept.
Don’t worry. You likely wouldn’t remember even if you were taught. 5280 feet/mile is just not worth the brain space. Neither is 8 pints/gallon. I don’t think you would convert between the two often enough to make it useful information to just know.
And I do have to look up those prefixes for the less used ones. It’s exa then peta or peta then exa and what’s bigger than them? What’s smaller than nano? I don’t remember because it rarely comes up. But I’m in tech, so it’s starting to more.
I remember 5280 despite being Australian because I saw that stupid mnemonic tweet. I remember the SI prefixes because of xkcd.
If you pretend to be a confused foreigner you can make them do math
Suddenly trying to convince all my friends and family I’m from France.
The irony is a real foreigner could probably do maths better than them.
Metric has been legally “preferred” in the US since 1975. We just don’t use it.
Also while I was looking up that year I came across this wild factoid:
In 1793, Thomas Jefferson requested artifacts from France that could be used to adopt the metric system in the United States, and Joseph Dombey was sent from France with a standard kilogram. Before reaching the United States, Dombey’s ship was blown off course by a storm and captured by pirates, and he died in captivity on Montserrat.
So
pitatespirates are why America uses freedom units.Damn those ruthless pitates!
Here I thought you made a typo…but no, you typed it exactly right :D
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We should have gone metric in the 70s. This year will be the 45th anniversary of the Metric Conversion Act, which was signed on December 23, 1975, by President Gerald R. Ford. You may have even seen a map that has been incriminatingly illustrated to show how they are out of step with the rest of the world. It’s a compelling story and often repeated, but you might be surprised to learn that it’s simply untrue!
You could always use the metric system, that was always allowed. Most food (I’ve seen) has both imperial and metric measurements. Most digital measuring devices and lots of analog ones will have options for both. Speedometers generally have both.
Really, the only one stopping you from using the metric system in your daily life is you. Unless of course you’re saying you want other people to use it. Which is a distinctly different proposition.
I’d argue the two greatest barriers for the average, non-STEM individual adopting metric in America is the speed limits being in mph and the temperature being in °F. Both are convertible easily enough, but when you constantly have to do so to engage with critical infrastructure or safety (cooking temps, etc.) It provides a barrier against adoption for anyone without the drive to make a concerted effort to use metric.
Between the two, I think temperature is the harder one. But strangely, it also brings weight and volume back into it: Cookbooks.
So many recipes are finely tuned balances of measurements that just look plain alien when converted to metric.
I think we were the first with metric money? We still pay for things in centidollars.
Why do Americans call the decimal system “metric”?
They’re different things. The metric system uses decimal. All metric units are decimals, but not all decimals are metric measurements.
You’re right that money is decimal, not metric.
Because that’s it’s name
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system
But if you wanna get all specific about it we can call it SI
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units
It’s certainly not the Decimal system
There’s no such thing as metric money. What are you talking about?
Sorry, I thought you were making a general comment. I didn’t realize you we’re criticizing the “metric money” statement.
But, reading over that person’s comment again they also say “centidollars”, which also doesn’t exist, so I believe they were trying to make the point that the US was the first to make a currency that seems to adhere to the same principles as the metric system since their currently since 1 centidollars = 1 cent = 1 dollar/100.
(I’m pretty sure it was a joke though. We don’t use kilodollars, etc)
My Megadollar says otherwise.
Non-metric or non-decimal money is referring to systems where the multiple tiers of money, like our cents and dollars, are seperated by amounts other than 10 or 100, like the old British system of 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/£sd
I’m a scientist. I’ve used the metric system since grade school. In fact, I convert Imperial measurements to metric to do estimates.
Engineer here, I just use whatever’s convenient. It’s handy to know both.
That said, I did confuse a poor coworker of mine this week when I was using bar for tank pressure and psi for the safety reliefs. That’s totally on me though.
You can’t have it because of peer pressure from dead people. You gotta take them seriously, motherfuckers will haunt your ass and say shit like “thirty fathoms, gold dubloons and schooners, twenty nickel shillings”. We have the metric system in our country and the ghosts suck, they don’t even try to come up with sensical nonsense phrases for the sake of the bit, the lazy bastards.
I dunno, it’d probably be better but there’s nothing stopping people from using metric in places where it makes sense. I write most of my recipes in grams because it makes them easier to multiply or divide.
At the same time, the most common thing people use units for is a point of reference, and it really makes no difference whether your point of reference is metric or traditional units.
Congrats!
You could drive this one stretch https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/i19-americas-only-metric-interstate
I ended up on this last year as I was exploring the South West. I found it confusing even as a Canadian.
I then later was confusion when Google Maps told me to go 80 on Hwy 10 in Texas once I came up from Big Bend NP. I thought the GPS was confused. 80 kms on the highway in the US? It was then I realized I wasn’t in Oregon anymore with their 60 mph highways. Texas goes fast and even 80 mph isn’t enough for most people. Even the single lane highways with construction workers was 65 mph work zones in Texas.
It was the most amount of road kill I’ve ever seen in all my travels. I think at one stage a herd of goats must of tried to cross the highway based on the carnage I came across. I finally understood the reason for the huge bumpers on the front of trucks in Texas now.
that’s technically I-30.5
Dammit people, we need to stay focused. First abolish DST THEN institute the metric system! We have to have our priorities in order and stay organized or we will never accomplish anything!
Why not just metric, so we can get those metric seconds, then daylight time wouldn’t matter anymore.
DST is good actually. Fite me.
DST is bad, byte me
If we abolish DST, I think we should tweak some of our timezones. With dst, where I’m at the sun is currently rising before 5. If we kept standard time, it would be up before 4. Sun rise at 3 something and sunset at 7 something is really out of whack with how most people want sun allocated to their day.
I’m sorry but divided we fall. It’s this kind of nonsense that impeeds progress. One thing at a time. Just get rid of it and then tweaks can be made on the state level. Arizona for example already abolished DST.
I’d honestly rather the switching than ending up on standard time year round.
Why do you want the sun to set early?
I’d rather have an extra hour of sun after work than an hour of sun before work
I think most people enjoy DST. Most complain when it’s dark at 5 pm.
I don’t give the first two half-flaccid thrusts of a reluctant pity fuck what number the clock says when the sun rises or sets. 4, 5, 6, 11, don’t care. It’s the practice of changing the clocks twice a year that needs to die in a fire.
The logic should be “Let’s open our business from 7 to 4 instead of 8 to 5 so that we have more free time during sunlight hours in the evening” not “Let’s change all the clocks everywhere so that the sun is two fingers higher in the sky when the clocks say 5 so that we have more free time during the sunlight hours in the evening.” You want to vary YOUR routine with the seasonal change in sunlight hours? Great. “Summer hours 7 to 4, winter hours 8 to 5” or whatever. Managing this by changing all clocks everywhere causes more problems than it solves. I don’t know if I could intentionally invent a stupider solution to the “problem.”
This has been the thought in my head when the argument comes up. Glad I’m not alone.
Preach on brother!
You can make summer time the regular time you know. Removing dst is about getting rid of changing the clocks twice a year.
“Summer time” is DST
If you removed DST, we would always be on standard time.
What you are saying is make DST permanent, not removing DST
What anyone mean when they say get rid of dst is to stop the flipflopping.
But i guess you are technically right. Witch i have heard is the best kind of right. Even if very pedantic ;)
You think that because it’s how you feel or you have different stats on opinions taken from large samples in an unbiased fashion that lead you to believe this?
If it’s the former please see https://paylesspower.com/blog/beyond-the-clock-exploring-the-nations-pulse-on-daylight-saving-time/
If the latter, please consider sharing your data.
I think it depends on where you are in your timezone if you prefer DST or standard time. But most people seem to not like changing the clock. It just turns into a fight if we should stay on DST or standard time year round.
Of those 62% that indicated they would like to get rid of the practice of changing the clocks entirely, exactly half of them prefer the option of later sunrises and sunsets, as in year-round daylight-saving time, compared with 31% preferring year-round standard time.
https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-polling-shows-americans-utterly-divided-2023-3
Ahh, yes, 1002 people is a large sample size, like .003% of the population.
Your article is also about switching. Doesn’t say anything about if people would prefer to stay on DST or standard time.
The way statistical sampling works, 1000 people in a population of 300,000,000 is actually good enough for most things. You can play around with numbers here to convince yourself, but at 95% confidence 1000 people will give an answer to within 3% of the true answer for the 300,000,000 population.
If the 300m people lived in the same area and you got a true random sample.
Sunsets at 9:09 today in Michigan
Sunsets at 8:04 today in California
Sunsets at 8:34 today in North Carolina
Sunsets at 7:57 today in Alabama
Sunsets at 7:38 today in Arizona (They are on standard time)
Sunsets at 7:13 today in Hawaii
Sunsets at 11:36 today in Alaska
Someone in Arizona might want the sun to set at 7:38. It’s blazing hot all day.
Someone in Michigan might be fine with sunsetting at 8:08 with standard time.
Someone in Alabama might not want the sun to set at 6:57.
Someone in Hawaii probably doesn’t want the sun to set at 6:13.
Even if you split up the 1000 people to equally represent all states, that’s only 20 people per state.
I mean, yeah, 1000 people is enough assuming there’s no sampling bias. But if you’ve got sampling bias, increasing the sampling size won’t actually help you. The issue you’re talking about is unrelated to how many people you talk to.
Your own suggestion of splitting up the respondents by state would itself introduce sampling bias, way over sampling low population states and way under sampling high population states. The survey was interested in the opinions of the nation as a whole, so arbitrary binning by states would be a big mistake. You want your sampling procedure to have equal change of returning a response from any random person in the nation. With a sample size of 1000, you’re not going to have much random-induced bias for one location or another, aside from population density, which is fine because the survey is about USA people and not people in sub-USA locations.
