Rick's b.log - entry 2015/03/15

Yesterday was Pi day...?

There's a bunch of annoying little things wrong with this.

1. Dumb American date format. Either ascending (dd/mm/yyyy) or descending (yyyy/mm/dd) date formats make sense - with the descending format being better. The American (plus Canada, Belize, Micronesia, and in Swahili language...) jumbled-up (mm/dd/yyyy) format is just gibberish.
2. Seriously, who uses a two year date value in this day and age? Okay, fair enough, the joke doesn't work with 3/14/2015 but it's a lame joke at best.
3. The given time is wrong. The digit following is a 5, so it should be rounded to 9:27. If we're counting seconds then it would be 9:26.54pm (53 with a 5 following so rounds up).
4. Pi is impossibly long. Your calculator to eight digits? That's a mere approximation because it can't do any better and the result is "good enough" for high school maths. Just like managing to fix the same eight digits into a date is an approximation.
5. So people are baking pies with Pi on them. Uhh... Pie is said like Pi (and most are round) but otherwise they are quite different. There's no such thing as a CherryPi (at least, the Chinese haven't cloned a Beagle with an AllWinner chip and called it that...yet).
6. Has anybody celebrated 'e' day? 'e' is approximately 2.71828... oh, wait, we can't. We can't even celebrate the square root of 2 (1.4142135) as there's no 14th month (US/EU date) or 35th day (ISO date). It just so happens that we can botch Pi into a date format we use, predominately in America.

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hagbard, 16th March 2015, 00:56

It's a dumb British practice as middle-endian date formats were the standard in the British Empire until the early 20th C. The Americans just kept using the British standard they inherited in the 18th C. and never changed.

Alex, 17th March 2015, 20:17

hagbard, I am not sure that is entirely correct. Dates were written in a variety of styles including the use of regnal dates and until the calendar reform (Julian -> Gregorian) March was the first month. You don't find dates like mm/dd/yyyy but rather dates like February I, 18 Edward II which could be translated as 1st of February in the 18th year of the reign of Edward II. Later on regnal dates became less fashionable (around the reign of Victoria). Even so the month was rarely written with a number. So there was hardly a British standard even in the United Kingdom let alone the empire. It seems possible the Americans were the first to begin writing the month as a number but in a rather illogical way, the point being that 09/03/2015 is ambiguous (September 3rd?, March 9th?) but March 9th 2015 is never ambiguous.

Alex, 17th March 2015, 20:18

Meant also to say that I personally prefer the yyyy-mm-dd format despite being a Briton.

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