• Alabaster_Mango
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          62 months ago

          They could be from Canada too. We’re in that fun zone of being mostly Oxford/metric/DMY, but due to proximity and history we still use a lot of Webster/imperial/MDY. My dad is from the past so he speaks in Fahrenheit but calls it “English”. Send help.

          However, saying “July 23rd” feels more natural and efficient to me than “The 23rd of July”. That translates to me writing 07/23 over 23/07. To each their own though, I’m not gonna harsh any mellows over date formatting.

          • @[email protected]
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            22 months ago

            Coming from somewhere with the format the other way around, we do indeed say “23rd July” without all that extra fluff. So exactly the same efficiency wise. We simply count days like we’d count other stuff. For example I definitely didn’t had my coffee fourth just now.

            • Alabaster_Mango
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              32 months ago

              But “Coffee fourth”/“fourth coffee” and “23rd July”/“July 23rd” are different things. I don’t think it’s a good comparison.

              With the coffees you are counting how many you’ve had. The thing being counted is explicitly stated in the phrase.

              With dates, you are not counting the number of July’s. This isn’t my 23rd July, but the 23rd day of this July. The thing being counted is only implied by colloquial understanding.

              So yes, “coffee fourth” doesn’t work, but that doesn’t have much bearing on how to say a date in my opinion

              • @[email protected]
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                12 months ago

                You’re right, but the same must be said for July 23rd. Both are abbreviating “day in the month of july” to a simple mention of the month.

                At the end of the day both work, both are equally efficient, and simply come down to habit.

                • Alabaster_Mango
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                  22 months ago

                  Yeah, that’s my thinking too. English, and language in general, is very fluid. Different regions will have different colloquialisms, and even different dialects of the same language. So long as we all understand what is meant does it really matter all that much how it was said?

            • @[email protected]
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              22 months ago

              The funny thing is that both “July twenty-third” and “the twenty-third of July” are common in the US.

            • @[email protected]
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              22 months ago

              “Cup of coffee” is a mess of a phrase if you start to actually think about it. In English, it’s genitive; in German, it’s accusative; in Spanish, it’s nominative.

        • @[email protected]
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          22 months ago

          as if my Florida Man posting didn’t already give it away :P

          that said I have learned to prefer YYYY-MM-DD for all my cataloguing needs on computer because it sorts far more easily

    • @[email protected]
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      42 months ago

      Well, you could do the 31st of April, but it seems the universe disagrees with your date format.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 months ago

    How about March Fourteenth as “American PI-Day” and 22.07. as “international, sensible and widely understood PI-Day”, each according to the used date format?

        • @[email protected]
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          62 months ago

          DD-MM-YYYY is better, but still causes issues. ISO 8601 though, now that’s a superior format.

          • @Semjaza
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            22 months ago

            Also the date format used organically in East Asia because of the cultural habit of writing big to small.

            English tends small to big, so I don’t know where yanks got their date format from.

            • @[email protected]
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              22 months ago

              Can you elaborate on that last part? I fail to think of anything where its natural for English to go from small units to big units.

              • @Semjaza
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                32 months ago

                Addresses is the main one.

                But also when talking about objects and categories, e.g. “the oak is a type of tree”, not “trees have a type which is oak”.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 months ago

    Fun fact: 355/113 = 3.14159…
    Close enough to pi so that using it for calculating the earth’s circumference from its diameter is accurate to within 3 meters.

  • @[email protected]
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    282 months ago

    That’s nice and helps remember it’s 22/7. Americans can have their 14th of March, and let 22/7 be the international pi day.

  • @[email protected]
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    192 months ago

    But Pi Day doesn’t end with the day. There can be Pi Hour, Pi Minute, Pi Second, Pi Milisec…

      • @[email protected]
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        122 months ago

        Speaking as someone from a blue country on that map. Most of the world is wrong though. The ISO standard is designed that way for a reason. Not putting the largest unit first is just silly.

        Also https://m.xkcd.com/1179/

        • @[email protected]
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          82 months ago

          Personally I can get behind YMD and DMY (while sticking to ISO would be preferrable for obvious reasons), but what on earth possessed people to come up with MDY?

          • @[email protected]
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            32 months ago

            I have no idea why it started that way, but in everyday speech we say dates with the month first. So that makes MDY just the thing everybody is used to.

            Fortunately the ISO format YYYY-MM-DD still has the month before the day, so I don’t have to worry about my fellow Americans getting it confused.

            • AceCephalon
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              2 months ago

              You know, I thought about it after reading the comments here, and I’ve thought of one possible explanation for MM-DD-YYYY, that being the order you effectively get the useful information from a date.

              Going by DD-MM-YYYY, you read the first part, and that tells you the day in a month, but not which month, just skimming that first section gives you no actually useful information about how near or far it is without reading the second.

              Doing MM-DD-YYYY on the other hand, you first read the month, which immediately tells you what part of a year it is, and if it’s relatively sooner or later, and then reading the second part of the date just gives more precision, rather than the whole useful answer.

              So basically, it makes it easier to skim dates within a year with more useful information listed first, whereas putting the year first would just delay or offset that same skimming method.

              Day first gives a range of error between 0 and roughly 330 days without reading further, whereas Month first gives a range of error of only up to 28 to 30 days depending on the month.

    • @[email protected]
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      42 months ago

      Pretty sure that iso standard of yours specifies using what you call military time, or 24 hour time system, which USA doesn’t use widely, so even they don’t use this standard

      • dch82
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        72 months ago

        What are you even talking about?

        Most countries use a 24hr clock

        Many countries that use a 24hr clock don’t even use ISO8601 officially.

        The only countries I know officially use ISO8601 are certain East Asian countries.

        I don’t think they even use ISO8601 in the US Military.

  • @[email protected]
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    82 months ago

    A man with an assault rifle at an island killing 77 people, many bellow 18, kinda ruined pi-approximation day in Norway.

      • JokeDeity
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        22 months ago

        It’s recent enough that it still haunts the people of the country. It’s also not an every day occurrence like in America.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 months ago

        From the wiki:

        2019 – Cyclone Idai makes landfall near Beira, Mozambique, causing devastating floods and over 1,000 deaths.
        2021 – Burmese security forces kill at least 65 civilians in the Hlaingthaya massacre.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 months ago

      TIL that not only is it legal to own guns in Norway, apparently you guys have a fairly high percentage of gun ownership.

      • @[email protected]
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        72 months ago

        Absolutely, but acquiring a weapon legally is a process involving the police and requires a sensible intent (like hunting, sports or defense against polar bears) and an approved safe storage. While there are a lot of weapons in Norway, it’s very heavily regulated.

        With that said, the terror in Norway was performed with a firearm which was obtained legally with approval from the police, so the system is far from perfect.

  • @[email protected]
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    72 months ago

    But then we’d have to deal with the savage barbarism of writing it with the day before the month.

      • @[email protected]
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        32 months ago

        Invalid argument as the ISO standard must include years. Not including years is just garbage

        • @[email protected]
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          62 months ago

          4th OF July,

          So date first, then the month?

          You don’t read 1/2 as “1slash2” do you? You read it as “half”, don’t you? You don’t read 3/4 as “three four” do you? You read it as “three quarters” or “three fourths”.

          Because we know how to conjugate numbers from context. Like say you finish 3. in a race. Would you read “3.” as “three” or “third”?

          (It’s quite ironic how often I end up having to teach Americans English, lol.)

          • @[email protected]
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            12 months ago

            say you finish 3. in a race

            Who would even type it that way? When talking about position, the suffix isn’t ignored, either in text or speech.

            As for fractions, they are just that; fractions. Divisible portions of a whole, so different rules apply to them. They can be in the plural sense as in two halves, or 3 quarters. But you don’t have a plural dates of the month, unless you’re counting multiple years. And in that case it’s month first. Like, if you were comparing this year to other years, you wouldn’t say “this was better than the last couple 4ths of July”. You’d say, “this was better than the last couple of July 4ths”

            • @[email protected]
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              42 months ago

              Who would even type it that way?

              You’ve never seen people use ordinal numbers?

              Never seen rankings of say, hand-egg players, put down as

              1. Namenamename
              2. Namenamename
              3. Namenamename

              ?

              “Ordinal” as in “by order” rather than cardinal numbers. In the middle of a a sentence you’d write “third” preferably, but you might also use “3rd”. My grammatically wrong sentence was on purpose to demonstrate that you can — or at least should be able to — read ordinal numbers.

              Just like you’d read 04.06.24 as “the fourth of July, 2024”. Well, you wouldn’t, you’d read that “the sixth of April”, but only because you’re using the stupid system for dates.

              “as in two halves or 3 quarters”

              Why didn’t you write “three”? Were you omitting more letters because you knew I would be able to read “3” as “three”? Yes. Good. We do that for other numerals as well, and depending on the context, you add things like “of” in between them. Where’d you get the word “quarter” when I just wrote down “4”?

              Thus it’s fourth of July, not “four July”.

              • @[email protected]
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                12 months ago

                That’s not Grammer though? That has nothing to do with how the english language works and everything to do with a nebulous idea of understanding.

                • @[email protected]
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                  12 months ago

                  It is.

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

                  In linguistics, a grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rules, a subject that includes phonology, morphology, and syntax, together with phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics.

                  “everything to do with a nebulous idea of understanding.”

                  What do you think language is?

    • @Semjaza
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      42 months ago

      Guess ya’ll just have to adapt to a better system.

      Give up on imperial while you’re at it too, you’ll be happier in the long run.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 months ago

      I was looking for you. Or someone like you. Or someone other than you.

      I need a Tau advocate and you got the job.

  • @[email protected]
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    52 months ago

    I have a Daughter who was born on Pi day. When she was little. she would tell you it’s the second most important day, right after Christmas. Pi Day actually became a school wide fun day because of her, (small rural schools can be fun that way). We would bring a couple of pies for her math class to celebrate. Oddly, she much prefers a strawberry cheese cake for her birthday over pies.

    I suspect she will NOT allow the change…

    • shastaxc
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      12 months ago

      Not very odd. It’s traditional to use a cake for bday instead of pie.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 months ago

        But not for Pi Day. Having taught classrooms how to calculate Pi by tossing “frozen hot dgos” and literally timing the period of the swing of an apple pie suspended from the ceiling, it’s pies or nothing!