Comment on Tomorrow...

• dharmacurious@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Yeah… People are weird in this comment section. One person said the only natural way to read numbers was biggest first, as if it were a universal truth. And while there are variations in date format, to my knowledge most people don’t write the date with the year first? Like, it’s the least useful number to put first. I have rarely asked for the date and been actually inquiring what year it is. The day is the number I want to know most of the time. Day, month, year, in order of which number you most likely need to know first.

  Month, day, year on government forms for some reason, though :/

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  • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    The day is the number I want to know most of the time. Day, month, year, in order of which number you most likely need to know first.

    No, getting the year wrong by 1 is much more significant than getting the day wrong by 1. If you’re arguing that it won’t happen because people will infer from context the correct year, then you’re actually assuming that the person already does know the year first. The only reason why people don’t state the year is because it is already known by the listener. But just because it’s unstated doesn’t mean that it isn’t critically important.

    If you’re measuring duration, for example, you will put the largest unit first. The longest serving prime minister of the UK served for 20 years and 315 days. Magellan’s expedition around the lasted 2 years, 11 months, and 16 days, if you count from Sanlúcar de Barrameda. The course record for the Iditarod race is 7 days, 14 hours, 8 minutes, and 57 seconds.

    And some languages are more irregular than others about numbers. In English, we say “sixteen” where the ones digit is said before the tens digit. French has some base 20 naming conventions that screw up the order, too.

    But when we write numbers, we go left to right, largest to smallest. That’s why describing time should follow the same convention, and why ISO 8601 exists.

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    • dharmacurious@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Sure

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