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South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

independent.co.uk

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Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#121

Post by tialaramex »

Kamq wrote: post #15
simple10 wrote: post #9

Ah standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time.

I'm willing to adopt the metric system, but I want to use alternative base-units to screw with people. By which I mean, something like using rods, but with SI-prefixes.

Why rods? Use one of the Natural unit systems, for example, how about one of the systems where c = 1 which makes matter/energy conversions much easier, as now Einstein's equation simplifies to E=m justifying insistence on the same units for measuring how much electricity you used last month and your target "weight" at a doctor's appointment :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#123

Post by qingcharles »

skissane wrote: post #20
simple10 wrote: post #9

Ah standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time.

> Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system Seriously though, I wonder if immigration is going to help with that? Almost everyone else in the world uses metric in everyday life. Immigrants to the US have to go through the unpleasant process of adjusting to not doing so. I'm sure many (most?) of them wish they didn't have to do that. As the immigration process continues, might this lead to growing popular…

If it adds to the anecdata, as an immigrant I make sure to moan loudly and daily to all natural-born Americans I meet about the infuriating measuring system.

(and I come from the UK which is still half-metric)

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#124

Post by chungy »

quicklime wrote: post #92
chungy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative take: the US customary units have stuck around because SI has failed to present itself as better enough to switch. Grant that all base units are arbitrary[1], many of the customary units make easier logical sense in day-to-day life, or are designed to be divisible in easier units than SI units are designed to be. Do you want ⅓ of a foot? Well, that's 4 inches (12 inches in a foot, divide by 3, you get 4).…

> What's a more convenient scale for human living conditions? 0–100 °F or -20–40 °C? I am aware people live in even colder and hotter environments, but the majority of people in the world don't need to worry about values outside of this range. I also think "0 is very cold" and "100 is very hot" just makes more sense than "-20 is very cold" and "40 is very hot". The idea that 0-100F is somehow the range of “human livi…

> but I can see why someone from a place like the American Midwest might think this is true.

Ironic since I don't live in the midwest. I've visited there during summer once. :)

> The difference between -1C and 1C is something you can literally see around you. The difference between -1F and 1F is not. Anything “below zero” is literally frozen and completely inhospitable to normal human life!

I dunno, down to 20°F/-7°C, it's pretty easy to have liquid water still when hit by direct sunlight. It's also not really that extremely cold (I'm still fine with short sleeve shirts in the 20s F). 0°F/-17°C is where I'd say things get extremely cold and even direct sunlight ceases to melt water.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#125

Post by givemeethekeys »

Ekaros wrote: post #77
givemeethekeys wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> abolish daylight saving time I wish we'd standardize the world over on DST. I prefer having an extra hour of sunshine in the evening than the morning. Permanent DST year round!

Just get rid of it and mandate work/school starts hour earlier...

In which country do you think you'd be able to mandate that?

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#126

Post by frozenport »

nine_k wrote: post #96
fosk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lua is the “last standing man” now.

Every language for scientific computation uses 1-based indexes, to follow the tradition of using them in formulas. FORTRAN, APL, Julia, R, MATLAB, GNU Octane, etc. I remember that (some versions of) BASIC back in the day had an option to switch between 1-based and 0-based indexing, to appeal to both Fortran and C folks.

Numpy

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#127

Post by ronsor »

Gigachad wrote: post #61
jmjerlecki wrote: post #23

I can already imagine the arguments the team required to implement this change are having about the best way to make this change in the db.

Surely the DB just stores the full date of birth so it’s no issue.

A lot probably don't. Since everyone is a year older at the same time, you could've gotten away with storing one integer.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#128

Post by petesergeant »

Symbiote wrote: post #101
petesergeant wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even to this day, I intuitively group friends based on the academic year group they were in How far out of school are you?

I left university over 10 years ago, but I'm still aware of those friends who were in my year, vs others who were a year or two ahead or behind. People from my year are the ones I lived with, did group projects with, worked until midnight trying to solve a difficult task that had been set, celebrated the last exam with, etc. I certainly don't know the year for everyone. Students I mostly saw at parties, who studied d…

I feel like the op was mentally translating people they’d never shared an academic context with into how many academic years above or below them they were — I’d noticed myself doing this for a couple of years after I left education

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#130

Post by gerdesj »

skissane wrote: post #60
gerdesj wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Almost everyone else in the world uses metric in everyday life." RLY? Hello from the UK! Here we are metricated in general and then it goes a bit mad. As you know we generally have at least five ways of saying the same thing. Well actually we don't any more. Mostly metricated but we still have inches and feet etc hanging on in there. I suspect that most other countries are the same. I recall (my Mum) buying stuff in…

> RLY? Hello from the UK! I did say almost everyone . The UK is unusual in still retaining significantly more pre-metric units than the average country does, although still much less than the US. Road distances in miles and speed limits in miles per hour being the most obvious one. Almost everywhere on earth, other than the US and UK (and maybe a tiny handful more, such as Burma/Myanmar, Liberia, Antigua), road dista…

I studied Civ Eng at uni (poly. really) and engineering in the UK uses SI units exclusively except when we don't! Miles and mph and pints are largely the main leftovers. A yard is nearly a metre so that survives too and is conveniently made up of three feet and they are around 30cm, which is a short ruler. An inch is 2 1/2 cm and is roughly the size of your thumb to the first joint. The pound is a small half kilo. Spirits were metricated decades ago (25ml = 1 measure or "single", I think there is a 35ml measure for lower alc. spirits) and so were wine measures (125ml and 250ml).

Farenheit is no longer a thing these days here. I remember people talking about temps into the "100s" eg when Wimbledon was on and it was a proper scorcher. Have not heard that in at least 10 years, probably closer to 20. Ironically enough we have had a lot of record breaking temps in the last 10 years, across a record of about 150 years of decent data.

I'd love to see you pour a pint to five decimal places! Our Weights and Measures Act of ??? used to be pretty draconian and so was enforcement but that seems to have slipped somewhat. Our pint glass has a mark next to a crown (and an EU marking!) and the beer must hit it - you don't have to allow for the shape of the meniscus but a German used to having a decent "Feltwebel" (a nickname for the head on a beer - Sgt Major) is going to get into trouble! We also have special pint glasses with a longer section above the rib to allow for a larger head but still allow the pint mark to be met. I haven't seen those for a while.

I note you mention schooners and the like in AUS (and why on earth do you have a different pint size - it doesn't really matter) and that basically proves my point about routine odd units still in use, everywhere. We all have our little peccadilloes ...

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