I mean… They’re all kind of arbitrary in their own way, but one could argue that the excel time being invalid is actually useful because it serves as a null value - you know it’s incorrect, whereas on the other systems it could be the default date or it could be the actual date.
Excel having a stab at dates
Submitted 7 hours ago by bleistift2@sopuli.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/4f01200c-b7c7-4eb6-b5cf-f603f805bc86.webp
Comments
Kushan@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
DomeGuy@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
If you think that’s bad, look at what “1” means.
(And, honestly, at least windows’ “last big calendar change” and excel’s “start of the century when we wrote it” are reasonable points. The unix “let’s make it recent so we can fit an absurdly small unit as an integer!” Epoch is just… Weird.)
bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 7 hours ago
“start of the century when we wrote it”
This meme wouldn’t exist had they done that. But they chose the zeroeth of January for Excel.
radix@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Yep. “1” is 12:00am on 1-Jan-1900
Numbers less than zero just give a weird error. Between zero and less than one give a nonsense date-formatted non-date.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Fucking Microsoft.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
February zeroth, 1900. A red letter date.
Malfeasant@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
On Linux, 0 often works out to 12/31/1969 after local time zone conversion…
codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
🧐: 0 is the origin of time, the big bang (if you believe in that kind if thing)
The problem then is figuring out when earth (and then human) time starts, but we can just add some arbitrary offsets that feel right and everyone agrees on.
felsiq@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
Time is a pain in the ass and unfortunately not this simple, since it’s affected by energy and doesn’t pass at constant rates. The amount of time that’s passed since the Big Bang is different on earth than it is on a neutron star, for example, so one fundamental reference time isn’t possible the way it is for other units.
rumba@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
Now do 03:14:08 UTC on 19 January 2038!
Stovetop@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
I’d never noticed that in this order, it’s almost π!
Off by 0.001 and some change; that coincidence is going to haunt me.
rumba@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
the actual last 32 bit micro happens in 3:14:07 but that’s the wrong way :)
davidgro@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Easy. Just be 64-bit. (Or unsigned, but that’s not as good.)
match@pawb.social 3 hours ago
0 means now 🙂
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 1 hour ago
I work in the accounting team of my company, doing python development, and a lot of the sources I get came from the accountants that only use excel and every once in a while the date columns came completely fucked with that integral number excel uses sometimes and is a pain in the ass to translate to datetime.