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Freedom Clock

domsson.github.io

101–110 of 189 posts

Re: Freedom Clock

#102

I moved to the US from a country using metric system and different formats for things like date and currency. I don't really find the difference important at all and have no trouble switching between units and formats (my job requires me to exchange information with teams in Europe and Canada). I did find that for the sake of avoiding misunderstandings date should always start with the year. It's also good for sortin…

I have lived in English and Metric countries and have had no trouble with formats or units. I think it is because I didn't try to convert anything, just learned it as a new system. My wife on the other hand had a bunch of mental trick to convert between Metric and English, but she also never had any trouble with date or time formats.

The biggest problem to me is time zones and summer/winter time. I wish we all used UTC.

Re: Freedom Clock

#103
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're drawing the bullseye afterwards if remember my idioms correctly. That's informally known as the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy

So is the few examples from the OP...

I believe that cratermoon is helpfully reminding 5e92cb50239222b of the name of the formal fallacy 5e92cb50239222b is talking about.

Re: Freedom Clock

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America’s insistence on weird date and unit formats has a negative effect on software and resources used all around the world.

Developers aren't using M/D/Y. This is a straw man.

For example, if your company has a splunk install for log surveillance, it has a default of M/D/Y year format for all date ranges etc, it's a bit confusing, but it has localization too of course.

Developers who do devops tasks might run into this one.

Re: Freedom Clock

#105
post #10

Where's the European clock with the seconds first?

Exactly! What date format was used to land on the moon?

Ooh, let's play this game. Which date format was used to launch the first sattelite and human into space? What date format is used on the ISS and in the Hubble Telescope?

Re: Freedom Clock

#106
post #59
post #42

One thing I've come to learn is that American formats are human-friendly rather than machine-friendly. Our date system is like the Fahrenheit system; it works well when thinking like a human. in Fahrenheit, you just think of it in terms of 50 being the middle, "not cold and not hot". Then you understand 80 is high warm, closing in on hot, etc. Similarly for our date system, we lead with names and important informatio…

It only is human-firendly if you grew up with it, so it's rather "American-friendly". > You don't say "25th Apartment", you say "Apartment 25", We say 25th March in German. Saying the whole date follows the importance: day, month, year: fünfundzwanzigster märz zweitausenddreiundzwanzig.

“fünfundzwanzigster märz zweitausenddreiundzwanzig”

What I’m impressed with is the duration of time it takes to say todays date in Germany. I guess it’s rather “German-friendly” though. ;-)

Re: Freedom Clock

#107
post #87
post #37

To play devil's advocate, the American format aligns with how (American's at least) speak the date "March 24th, 2022".

"4th [of] July, 2023" and "July [the] 4th, 2023" are both valid - I'd bet there's a correlation between spoken order and written order, but not sure which caused which (or maybe mutually reinforcing).

"4 July 2023" is a common written format, but you would never say it out loud.

Re: Freedom Clock

#108
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

water freezes at 0, boils at 100. this is an excellent and intuitive scale for a human that is 70% water. The SI units, like kg or m are characteristic of the human scale. and more importantly, sanely decimal. and you say 3rd street, not Street 3. and 4th of july i do prefer the american decimal point 1,000.00 , it makes more sense. But it's time for humans to quit our nonsense and give way to machines , which requir…

That’s why I say 11rd Street and set my hot pot to 1100100 degrees. The added benefit is I can now do math on my fingers with a 100x greater range! Bring in toes and it gets insane.

I feel like people like you should be required to use | and O instead of 0 and 1. You don't get to spoil our perfect arabic numerals for your numerical travesty. begone, you wasters of bytes

Re: Freedom Clock

#109
I've settled on the explanation that this is just a cultural difference, and anyone arguing from a place of "logic" or "correctness" is refusing to accept that it's all convention, and different people do things differently.

As an analogy, some languages put the verb at the end of the sentence (e.g. Latin, certain German grammatical structures). As an English speaker, this is weird because I don't really know what's going on until the sentence is done, and it feels like I'm putting together a little puzzle in my head. Whereas to a fluent speaker, it presumably just makes sense and you don't really find it difficult. Same thing with dates.

As an American, I like our convention for writing dates. I usually care about month first. Immediately upon seeing a date, I know the rough time frame. Is it this month? Next month? Around Christmas? Around my birthday? Then the day pins it down to something specific. I will assume a date is referring to the current year, unless I see a different year, in which case it's a quick update to my mental model. April 12 flows as "soon, and exactly 18 days away" and September 12 flows "far away, and the middle part of the month".

I get that computers are a different use case, and there I'm a ISO 8601 advocate.

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