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Palindrome Day 20200202

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Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#151

Post by lucideer »

Symbiote wrote: post #148
tikej wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Poland We do it exactly as you said: Street_name street_number/house_number Postal_code, City, Country

The typical English-influenced way to do it starts with the number,the most specific thing. 10 Downing Street London SW1A 2AA (The postcode is least-specific first: SW is South West London, 1 is the district nearest Central London, and the 2 would usually be a few streets and the AA 5-10 houses, but this is a unique code for an address that gets a lot of post.)

Funnily enough, with the addition of the newest element to that format — the postcode — to the end, this format also becomes less "logical", postcode being very specific.

Of course that's arguable, as postcode shouldn't really be considered a component of-, rather an alternative to- other sections of the address.

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#152

Post by Symbiote »

Z1515M8147 wrote: post #143
hkmurakami wrote: post #3

I hope this is pointed out to kids in classrooms all over the world. Growing up I remember my teachers would point out these cute number tricks/events which contributed to piquing my interest in math and numbers, and eventually engineering.

My high school math tutor's cute thing to point out was that for asymptotic functions like the graph of y = 1/x [1], since the universe is spherical, the asymtotes will travel off the page in a straight line around the universe and eventually meet, coming back onto the graph in another quadrant from the other direction, so in fact it is one single connected line. I went into engineering and not physics, and never lea…

My maths teacher for much of secondary school, who was the "pure maths" teacher when we were old enough for that to be taught separately, started one year with an elaborate 4-colour drawing of a steam locomotive on the whiteboard. There was no explanation or further reference to it in that lesson.

As we learnt trigonometry, he'd sometimes draw just part of the scene, and explain how it related to what we were learning.

I remember the coupling rods: as the locomotive moves, each end traces a sine curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupling_rod

And also the electric catenary, which has a hyperbolic cosine curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhead_line

I think there were also the pistons on the steam locomotive, and the curvature of the track.

(Occasionally, it was like the intro to https://vimeo.com/77451201 )

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#153

Post by eganist »

CrazyStat wrote: post #149
eganist wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man , regarding your literary works argument, but I'll bite. The person described could exist, so gendering them is inappropriate if we're to fix our issues with inclusion in tech. If you're asserting that the person described is definitely fictional, sure, give them any gender. But they're not, they're a hypothetical person with non-trivial likelihood. Characters in novels have a…

Thanks, I'm familiar with the concept of a straw man argument. I obviously don't think my argument is a straw man. Linking the Wikipedia page is the same kind of dismissiveness that I noted earlier. In any case I'm glad you expanded on your argument, and I'll take the time to reply. I'm skeptical that the specificity of events in the story matters much. For example, if I were to write a fictionalized novel about the…

The original author presented a concise and coherent rebuttal, which I've accepted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22217812

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#154

Post by Symbiote »

skrebbel wrote: post #150
Naracion wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what's your native language?

Dutch. Afaik all Germanic languages except English¹ (and close relatives) have the same thing. Ie this stuff is the same in Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish², etc. We don't say "Twenty-three" but "Three-and-twenty". So far so good, but we do the hundreds, thousands etc just like English does. Thus, 123 is pronounced "hundred-three-and-twenty", i.e. precisely as nuts as what Americans do with dates. ¹) I assume that Eng…

(And you didn't even mention how "tredive" is pronounced.)

Swedish and Norwegian (and English for that matter) used to count the Germanic way, but swapped to the modern way for 20 onwards at various points.

There's an English nursery rhyme "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" which has the old way as its title. English also used to use the vigesimal system. My great-grandfather was supposedly a bit of a traditionalist even amongst his rural friends, who poked fun at him for saying things like "two score nine? I'm not paying that!".

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#155

Post by Symbiote »

School-Cotton wrote: post #124
iso947 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assertion that most people and most countries in spoken language say “day [of] month”, which I find anecdotally accurate, although that’s mainly in European countries and languages This matches why almost every country in the world uses “d/m/y” in normal usage.

If you were aware of the mind-boggling diversity of human language you would not make claims like “typical languages do X so one that doesn’t is idiosyncratic” (unless backed by serious research spanning the thousands of known languages). You would also not think experience with a few languages from the Indo-European family is generalizable. Standard Chinese for example uses Y/M/D and I’m sure you can find many examp…

I think the only major language using the M, D, Y spoken order are American-influenced English and Ewe (Ghana etc).

Several countries write a short data as M/D/Y, but these mostly have a significant American influence.

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#156

Post by Kaiyou »

hibbelig wrote: post #79
mopsi wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so crazy about the German notation? Seems to make perfect sense, as it goes line-by-line from the smallest to the largest sorting unit: 1. Exact street location (street + house) 2. District (postal code) 3. City 4. Country Also I prefer this order over the Chinese, because I assume most people handling mail will need to smallest details and it would just be very annoying if local mailmen had to skip over count…

The house number is smaller than the street, but the street comes first. If we put the house number first, then we'd get a logical order.

You're thinking of street and house number as two things. Germans don't. Or at least I don't. Your approach makes as much sense as picking movie titles with numbers at the end apart into two things.

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#157

Post by Kaiyou »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #47
rags2riches wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the Fourth of July then?

What about it? It's the name of a holiday. 12/25 is often called Christmas, and yet 9/29 is never called Michaelmas. Same thing.

Huh, where I'm from the 24th of December is Christmas. The 25th is the day after Christmas.

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#158

Post by stared »

CameronBanga wrote: post #132
freyir wrote: post #21

The Human Palindrome will be born tomorrow and die on 2121-12-12 at the age of 101. And in true palindromic fashion, his life will start and end with diapers.

Note that there are ~360,000 babies born everyday. On average today, 70% of Americans live to the age of 65. That rate varies greatly from country to country, but let’s assume that due to improvements in medical science and wealth, the likelihood of anyone born today, worldwide, being 50%. After that, it’s a bit tougher. But today, the likelihood of a person aged 65 reaching the age of 100 is 3%. I couldn’t find data…

There are quite a few life tables, vide https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html.

It seems that roughly for 360k babies there should be 1 man and 8 women dying at that age (death rate is ~60% per year). Of course, assuming US death rates, and technology as of today. Given that most kids are being born in poorer regions, and that global warming my seriously affect life span (especially in these regions), the results may be significantly lower.

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#159

Post by droithomme »

skrebbel wrote: post #35
susam wrote: post #13

The nice thing about today's date, 2020-02-02, is that it is palindrome in three date formats: YYYYMMDD, DDMMYYYY, and MMDDYYYY. This should probably be called "Universal Palindrome Day" because it is a palindrome irrespective of the endianness (big, little, or middle) that is used in various countries. Here is the list of all such dates until the year 9999: 0101-10-10 1010-01-01 1111-11-11 2020-02-02 2121-12-12 3030…

I love the term "middle endianness" and how clearly it highlights how nuts the American date notation is. EDIT: fwiw, in my native language, most numbers from 100 and 1000 are pronounced middle endian, so I'm not complaining.

> how clearly it highlights how nuts the American date notation is

Middle Endian dates make sense when the season something happens in is important.

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#160

Post by bloak »

hibbelig wrote: post #52
thaumasiotes wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The American date notation is simply a direct reflection of the spoken language. We say "February second, 2020" and we write "2/2/2020". (Contra the root comment, I can't agree that 2/2/2020 is a palindrome.) I don't see this as being crazy or even unusual. When order matters, you invariably want big-endian notation, which is why that notation is acceptable everywhere regardless of the usual native notation. But by t…

That middle-endianness is spoken doesn’t make it better. It’s still crazy. Starting with the most general and ending with the most specific is a logical order. Doing it the other way round is also logical. But starting with the middle makes no sense. It doesn’t seem unusual to you because you use it often. That said I’m German and I realize that German postal addresses are crazy for the same reason. I wish we‘d adopt…

Hungarian addresses are (or were) worse. According to http://www.columbia.edu/~fdc/postal/, it's:

1. name of recipient, 2. town name, 3. street address or post box number, 4. four digit postal code.

(I have a vague memory of seeing that sort of order in German, too, in a historical context, but perhaps it was from Austria-Hungary.)

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