Hatrack River Forum: American Dates are Killing Me

This is topic American Dates are Killing Me in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.

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Posted by Jonathan Howard (Member # 6934) on :

I don't mean that I don't know what the fourth of July is.

I mean that date format is inconsistent; for some reason or another the US decided that their independence day will be "07/04/1776" and not "04/07/1776". It's driving me crazy.

Mind you, I understand the logic. The first thing you see is the month, not the day, meaning it gives you the perspective - and you know first off what month it is - the day will make little difference (usually) - so it gives you the general picture first.

But it's inconsistent. And it's killing me.

If it were year-month-day, one thing. If it's day-month-year it's the same. But month-day-year is just too confusing, I don't know when it's American and when it's worldwide. I never know when a letter is written in this format or the other - and I ned to do a lot of guesswork.

It only settles in on Armistice Day and on D-Day. But it's killing me. WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE IN TWO DIFFERENT WAYS? WHY DID ONE HAVE TO REINVENT THE WHEEL? Can't either side give up? Just like metrical and imperial systems. Neither's necessarily better, but at least they've got a completely different format. 15' isn't 15 metres, and 10M isn't 10 miles.

[/shouts]

I'm insane. But I have reason to be.
Jonny

Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :

Support ISO-standard date format: 2005-08-16.

Plus, it sorts correctly automatically, no conversion needed.

But the reason for the American format is that it directly reflects how we say dates: August 16, 2005.

Posted by Papa Moose (Member # 1992) on :

quote:
Plus, it sorts correctly automatically, no conversion needed.

Until the year 10,000, sure.

Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :

[Razz]

adam.

Pops, the Y10K crisis will be horrible, that's for sure. Probably interrupt beer delivery and everything.

Posted by El JT de Spang (Member # 7742) on :

I also wish we (America) would go to the metric system. All through college, I would assume whatever problem I was given was taking place in Europe, so I could use metric units. Muuuch simpler. Which is why I'm one of the few people around who know their height in meters (1.90m). I'm also about 91kg.

I never knew the dates were different.

Posted by Enigmatic (Member # 7785) on :

Thought this was another forlorn romance thread.

--Enigmatic

Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :

I just think dates should be properly supported as a data type, and could care less how they're stored, letting people create representations however they like [Wink]

Posted by Megan (Member # 5290) on :

fugu, I think you mean you couldn't care less. [Evil]

Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :

So dates are objects, not just data?

date.careLess();

Posted by Hamson (Member # 7808) on :

quote:
Just like metrical and imperial systems. Neither's necessarily better, but at least they've got a completely different format.

Excuse me? Neither's necessarily better? do you think it's easier to remember 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 1760 yards in a mile (or 5280 feet in a mile), OR 10mm in a cm, 10cm in a dm, 10dm in a m, 1000m in a km?

This brings up a question, is 10 meters called anything special?

Posted by The Pixiest (Member # 1863) on :

If American dates are killing you then maybe you should stop dating Americans.

Posted by Papa Moose (Member # 1992) on :

A dekameter, as I recall.

Posted by Hamson (Member # 7808) on :

Ah, thanks Papa.

Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :

Perhaps, Megan, perhaps [Wink]

Dagonee: there's no such thing as "just data", except the binary data that higher level programming languages (which SQL assuredly is) should not be exposing directly to the programmer (except with express and preferably difficult effort).

Every bit of data in SQL or other decently high level programming language has a type which determines the operations that are possible on it. This does not mean that data is in an object in the sense of OOP, just that it is manipulated in a certain way.

Now, most data has a typical representation which is almost all we see of the data, but that doesn't mean it is the data.

Many people put SQL dates into some form of string (varchar, commonly), but that's a bad practice. Instead, one should use the SQL date and time types, which sort naturally but can be displayed any way one chooses. These do have a typical representation, but often one you wouldn't want to display -- seconds since the epoch, perhaps.

Objects are only a narrow section of possible data typing systems, all of which the above comments are applicable to. I much prefer the ability to create first class types that needn't use primitives and other objects as internal data representations. Haskell has excellent capabilities in this line, letting me do things like

code:

data Color = Red | Green | Blue

No need to keep track of constant strings, no need to use a number lookup, colors just "are" red, green, blue, or whatever else has been defined -- like integers just are 0, 1, 5, -2, or whatever. If you want to do stuff dependent on the RGB values of numbers, you'd write a function that accepted something of type Color and returned some type of thing containing the appropriate numeric information.

Or for an even better example:

code:

data Tree a = Leaf a | Branch (Tree a) (Tree a)

Which tells us a Tree holding things of type a can be made by either having a Leaf holding something of type a or a Branch holding two trees holding things of type a.

So I could make a function which retrieves the "leftmost" leaf of a Tree as follows:

code:

leftmost (Leaf x) = x
leftmost (Branch left right) = leftmost (left)

These types are all just as first class as Haskell's built-in types, the latter just have some syntactic sugar and low level optimizations.

This is unlike an OO language such as java, where the types programmers create are not as first class as java's types.

Posted by Tante Shvester (Member # 8202) on :

Jonathan, avoid these!

[ August 16, 2005, 07:09 PM: Message edited by: Tante Shvester ]

Posted by jeniwren (Member # 2002) on :

fugu, if I were single, that post would have had me asking for your phone number. [Smile]

Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :

*wonders if he should use the post as a pickup line [Wink]

Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :

Um, fugu, it was a joke about dates "caring" based on the ambiguity about which noun was the subject of "could care less."

[Grumble]

whippersnapper.

Posted by Indignigo (Member # 8496) on :

Dare you, fugu. [Smile]

Posted by Tante Shvester (Member # 8202) on :

Ah, geek love...

Posted by Jonathan Howard (Member # 6934) on :

Tante - what?!

Posted by Tante Shvester (Member # 8202) on :

What?

Posted by Jonathan Howard (Member # 6934) on :

Avoiding what?

Posted by Tante Shvester (Member # 8202) on :

Huh? How did that happen? Wrong URL. Try again.

And, uh, you might want to avoid the other, too.

Not tzneius.

Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :

I fear ours is a weak and degenerate time. In the old days, when people fought their way to power over a heap of corpses, they forced the conquered to submit to Christianity, or Catholicism, or Islam. Me, I just plan to force conversion to the metric system. Alas, as dictators go, I'm rather boring.

Posted by Tante Shvester (Member # 8202) on :

You will never be our ruler.

The best you can settle for is meter stick.

Posted by Jonathan Howard (Member # 6934) on :

I have a lot of meter in my poems... (But not metre... Sorry - my spelling habits prevent it from being a perfect pun!)

Posted by Tante Shvester (Member # 8202) on :

It was far from perfect, no matter how you spelled it. [Roll Eyes]

Posted by Jonathan Howard (Member # 6934) on :

Nevertheless, the spelling prevents it from being perfect. Perhaps not the only reason for it, but one nonetheless.

Posted by Heffaji (Member # 3669) on :

quote:
I have a lot of meter in my poems... (But not metre... Sorry - my spelling habits prevent it from being a perfect pun!)

Having such a dirty mind, I read that as "I have a lot of meter in my pants..."

Posted by Tante Shvester (Member # 8202) on :

You're going to meet her where? [Eek!]

Posted by Goody Scrivener (Member # 6742) on :

Hey Jonny, now you know how some of us Americans feel trying to decode European dates!!! LOL

Posted by Jonathan Howard (Member # 6934) on :

Then we've got a problem: two formats, one needed.

(Based on: "I've got a drinking problem two hands, only one mouth.")

Unless you were punning too - in which case, ha. Ha.

Posted by quidscribis (Member # 5124) on :

Be glad you don't live in Canada, where the date format you see depends on . . . whoever wrote the code or the date down. Seriously. Canadians. Fickle. [Dont Know]

Posted by Tante Shvester (Member # 8202) on :

Phew! I just breathed a sigh of relief that I don't live in Canada. Besides that date thing, there's also the problem that it is so FAR AWAY from everything.

On the positive side, I hear that there is ample parking.

Posted by Xavier (Member # 405) on :

I say we switch to a metric clock.

Your basic unit is the day.

You break that down into decadays (1/10 of a day), centidays (1/100 of a day), and millidays (1/1000 of a day). Easy enough, right?

Why on earth did we decide that we should break the day into 24 pieces (or worse, 2 halves broken into 12ths!), then break those pieces into 60ths, and then those pieces into 60ths, and then those pieces into 100ths?

Makes no sense.

Edit: this of course doesn't mean anything date wise, but there I am sure we could improve as well. Is there such thing as a metric calendar? *checks google*

Posted by El JT de Spang (Member # 7742) on :

From howstuffworks.com -

Why are there 24 hours in a day?

No one really knows. However, the tradition goes back a long way. Take, for example, this quote from Encyclopedia Britannica:

The earliest known sundial still preserved is an Egyptian shadow clock of green schist dating at least from the 8th century BC. It consists of a straight base with a raised crosspiece at one end. The base, on which is inscribed a scale of six time divisions, is placed in an east-west direction with the crosspiece at the east end in the morning and the west end in the afternoon. The shadow of the crosspiece on this base indicates the time. Clocks of this kind are still in use in primitive parts of Egypt.
The Babylonians seem to be the ones who started the six fetish, but it is not clear why.

Why are there 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute?

Again, it is unclear. It is known, however, that Egyptians once used a calendar that had 12 30-day months, giving them 360 days. This is believed to be the reason why we now divide circles into 360 degrees. Dividing 360 by 6 gives you 60, and 60 is also a base number in the Babylonian math system.

It's obvious where days, years, and months come from, but I've always wondered about hours, minutes, seconds, and weeks.

Posted by Jay (Member # 5786) on :

Wow….. I learned something on Hatrack today.
Guess I’m done for the day. I can go home and go to sleep now.
Yippie!

Posted by Tante Shvester (Member # 8202) on :

quote:
I say we switch to a metric clock.

Like on "Battlestar Galactica", where they would say "just a centon" instead of "just a minute"?

How futuristic!

Posted by Jonathan Howard (Member # 6934) on :

quote:
It's obvious where days, years, and months come from, but I've always wondered about hours, minutes, seconds, and weeks.

Hours, minutes and seconds from Babylon. They had a 12-based system; look at their numerals.

Weeks? From Judaism! Clearly so.

Posted by CStroman (Member # 6872) on :

quote:
DOES IT HAVE TO BE IN TWO DIFFERENT WAYS? WHY DID ONE HAVE TO REINVENT THE WHEEL? Can't either side give up?

Diversity, individuality and all that modern day stuff.