141–150 of 189 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
The great way to imply that non-Americans are not "like a human".
> Similarly for our date system, we lead with names and important information rather than numbers.
If I say March 30, the year number is implied (probably this year) and I probably have omitted it because it is not as important enough to say again.
If I say 2023-03-30, the year number is probably important. Might not that important, but at the least I'm looking for future readers who might not realize that I've made this comment in 2023. The year number is thus as important as month and day of month here, so consistency matters more. And the American mixed endian date format is as inconsistent as mixed byte endianness (which is thankfully gone by now).
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.
The English equivalent for 1125 would be onethousand-onehundred-five-and-twenty.
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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?).
JSYK, a more native phrasing would be "follows the numbers". "Proceeds" would be too easily confused for "precedes".
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…
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…
Maybe if you are an American. But non-Americans are puzzled when they see 10/03/08 and are told that that's October 3rd, 2008.
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People can die from "low" temperature as high as 10 C or 50 F.
While we're pointing out extreme outliers out of context to the discussion, water can also remain liquid well below 0c https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling
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.
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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 am usually an apologist for imperial units thanks to the divisibility by 3 and "human" scale, but temperature is ironically the one that I think is the silliest. It's basically arbitrary. The original idea of Farenheit was that 0-100 was the range between the freezing point of salt water and human body temperature, and it was designed to be convenient for use in labs. At the time, 0F was the coldest temperature you…
“Uncomfortable to touch” heavily depends on thermal capacity (how much heat there is in the object to touch) and thermal conductivity (how fast the object can get that heat into your skin), so I would think defining that exact point to be quite the challenge.
As to the Fahrenheit scale, it’s worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit:
“The other limit established was his best estimate of the average human body temperature, originally set at 90 °F, then 96 °F (about 2.6 °F less than the modern value due to a later redefinition of the scale)”
So, Fahrenheit arbitrarily picked 100 °F as some distance above the point for average human body temperature, changed it to 96 °F, and the scale was later redefined.
And still people claim that scale is less arbitrary than Celsius, Kelvin, Réaumur, etc.