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Freedom Clock

domsson.github.io

111–120 of 189 posts

Re: Freedom Clock

#111
post #8
post #3

I get it, it's really annoying that there are different formats. In fact I once nerfed a small database by importing a bunch dates from a csv in the wrong format. But honestly both formats (M/D/Y and D/M/Y) are wrong, as clear from the clock example: dates should be big-endian; Y/M/D.

While I agree that big-endian dates are the best solution (if nothing else, because lexical sort puts it in the right order), I think little-endian at least makes sense. The middle-endian format is just absurd.

To be honest, using date formats in Asian languages (Korean/Japanese/Chinese) is probably the best. There is zero confusion, as the word for "month," "day," or "year" proceeds the numbers directly: 2023년 3월 25일 in Korean, or 2023年3月25日 in Chinese (and Japanese?).

Re: Freedom Clock

#112
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't think so. If it's 0°C outside, I know it's probably time to put winter tires on because the water in the puddles will freeze. If water in the pot on my stove is close to 100°C, I know it will boil soon. Same with dates — it has nothing to do with being machine readable or not, dates should go from largest to smallest (yyyy-mm-dd, etc) or vise versa, not turn 180 degrees at midpoint for some reason. Your…

I think of 100F as being when weather starts becoming lethal if you are poorly prepared.

People can die from "low" temperature as high as 10 C or 50 F.

Re: Freedom Clock

#113
A fun fact about ISO 8601... it mandates[0] use of the proleptic Gregorian calendar for dates earlier than 15th October 1582. Now, in that calendar there is a year zero - so anyone using the proleptic Gregorian calendar can say that the 3rd millennium began on 1st January 2000, instead of the pedant's preferred date of 1st January 2001.

Since ISO 8601 is baked into so many modern systems and standards, and since software has eaten the world, there's a real sense in which we are all using it as our primary calendar - and thus for those of us who were celebrating on 1st January 2000, we can retro-canonically rest in peace knowing the fireworks were not mistimed after all.

[0] OK, there's some fuzziness in the wording, where "mutual agreement" must be sought before exchanging such earlier dates.

Re: Freedom Clock

#114
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…

Yeah, I don't think so. If it's 0°C outside, I know it's probably time to put winter tires on because the water in the puddles will freeze. If water in the pot on my stove is close to 100°C, I know it will boil soon. Same with dates — it has nothing to do with being machine readable or not, dates should go from largest to smallest (yyyy-mm-dd, etc) or vise versa, not turn 180 degrees at midpoint for some reason. Your…

0°F: cold, 100°F: warm

0°C: cold, 100°C: dead

0 K: dead, 100 K: dead

Re: Freedom Clock

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't think so. If it's 0°C outside, I know it's probably time to put winter tires on because the water in the puddles will freeze. If water in the pot on my stove is close to 100°C, I know it will boil soon. Same with dates — it has nothing to do with being machine readable or not, dates should go from largest to smallest (yyyy-mm-dd, etc) or vise versa, not turn 180 degrees at midpoint for some reason. Your…

If your body temp is over 100 F, you have a fever. If the outside is 100 F, it's too damn hot. The bottom end is much harder to justify but I believe the idea was that you wouldn't have to regularly deal with negative numbers. But both F and C are completely arbitrary. That's the least messed up part of the non-SI unit system.

Freezing and boiling water really does not seem that arbitrary to me.

Re: Freedom Clock

#117
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 works well when thinking like a human.

I think this is the cognitive bias from having grown up with the system.

Re: Freedom Clock

#118
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…

I keep seeing Americans claim that, but I really think your perception of this as more "more human-friendly" is really just a result of growing up with it.

Re: Freedom Clock

#119
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In reality I encode everything in raw bits but for these Europeans I convert to their hippy Unicode whatever. Why use 7 bits for a character when you can use UTF-8/16/32 - the “metric system” of encodings.

Re: Freedom Clock

#120
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I don't hear people say "July 4" either, but you do hear both with the ordinals as in the examples I gave.
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