Time is important because of the way we have structured our lives so heavily around clocks and calendars. So why do we have such a haphazard attitude to writing dates down?
Being a programmer I am really conscious of how important the Y2K bug was. Most people I mention it to are really blasé about it, thinking it was nothing but scaremongering. After all, nothing important went wrong, right? They don't realise how much frenzied activity there was behind the scenes fixing the problem before it came to crunch time. If the programmers of the world had sat back and said, "Don't worry about it. It's just a glitch." There would have been truly major problems. And what was the cause? People are too lazy to write 4 digits for the year instead of just 2. I can almost understand why. The problem seems so remote (unless you are a programmer who hopes to live for more than the next 87 years, or someone who cares about handing a godawful mess to the next generation). For a long time it doesn't appear to matter... until we approach the changeover into another century. Incredibly, after coming so very close to having major problems in computer systems around the world, what did everybody do immediately afterward? They continued to write the year as 2 digits. Unbelievable!
I've mentioned this to a number of people and the usual response is, "Oh well, it won't affect me". This is exactly why we are in this global warming problem, and the world energy crisis, and why there isn't enough food to go around (even though there really is plenty of food), and why the world is running out of the ecological diversity that lets us survive. Even if the solution is easy (write 2 more digits; waste less energy; waste less food; don't cut down the forests or sieve every living thing from the oceans) people couldn't be bothered changing their habits.
While we are on the topic of date, one thing that drives me nuts is that people in USA write dates differently to everybody else in the world. When reading a date that is just numbers I have to look to find out if the person who wrote it lives in USA or not. That's just plain crazy. Everybody else writes the date as day/month/year (for example 07/02/1911 -- or more likely, 07/02/11), whereas in USA they write it as month/day/year (02/07/1911 or probably 02/07/11). Can you see the problem with this? Unless the day is greater than 12 then there is no obvious way to tell if it is dated to February or July -- a big difference of it has to do with weather, or biology, or astronomy, or horticulture, or holidays, or appointments, etc). Not only is this very inconvenient, it doesn't make any sense. Why put the smallest unit between the two larger units?
I'm not the only programmer to be irritated by this. Many, many programmers around the world, including in USA, now use the far more sensible reverse-date format. That date would be written as 1911-02-07. Not only does this eliminate ambiguity, it has the additional advantage of self-sorting because in a list of files the years will sort in order, the months will sort within the years and the days within those without needing to do anything. It is also far more logical because that is already how we write numbers generally -- from largest to smallest. It's also how we write time, so right at this moment I can write the time as 2013-09-15 09:18:44 and it descends nicely and sensibly. When I first started doing this I found it a little hard to get used to, but I was very surprised at how quickly I came to think of dates this way. It is just so much easier and more natural.
I hope that eventually everyone will adopt reverse-date format. It just makes so much sense... especially now we are all part of a global village.
(Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/316211.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far:![comment count unavailable]()
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Being a programmer I am really conscious of how important the Y2K bug was. Most people I mention it to are really blasé about it, thinking it was nothing but scaremongering. After all, nothing important went wrong, right? They don't realise how much frenzied activity there was behind the scenes fixing the problem before it came to crunch time. If the programmers of the world had sat back and said, "Don't worry about it. It's just a glitch." There would have been truly major problems. And what was the cause? People are too lazy to write 4 digits for the year instead of just 2. I can almost understand why. The problem seems so remote (unless you are a programmer who hopes to live for more than the next 87 years, or someone who cares about handing a godawful mess to the next generation). For a long time it doesn't appear to matter... until we approach the changeover into another century. Incredibly, after coming so very close to having major problems in computer systems around the world, what did everybody do immediately afterward? They continued to write the year as 2 digits. Unbelievable!
I've mentioned this to a number of people and the usual response is, "Oh well, it won't affect me". This is exactly why we are in this global warming problem, and the world energy crisis, and why there isn't enough food to go around (even though there really is plenty of food), and why the world is running out of the ecological diversity that lets us survive. Even if the solution is easy (write 2 more digits; waste less energy; waste less food; don't cut down the forests or sieve every living thing from the oceans) people couldn't be bothered changing their habits.
While we are on the topic of date, one thing that drives me nuts is that people in USA write dates differently to everybody else in the world. When reading a date that is just numbers I have to look to find out if the person who wrote it lives in USA or not. That's just plain crazy. Everybody else writes the date as day/month/year (for example 07/02/1911 -- or more likely, 07/02/11), whereas in USA they write it as month/day/year (02/07/1911 or probably 02/07/11). Can you see the problem with this? Unless the day is greater than 12 then there is no obvious way to tell if it is dated to February or July -- a big difference of it has to do with weather, or biology, or astronomy, or horticulture, or holidays, or appointments, etc). Not only is this very inconvenient, it doesn't make any sense. Why put the smallest unit between the two larger units?
I'm not the only programmer to be irritated by this. Many, many programmers around the world, including in USA, now use the far more sensible reverse-date format. That date would be written as 1911-02-07. Not only does this eliminate ambiguity, it has the additional advantage of self-sorting because in a list of files the years will sort in order, the months will sort within the years and the days within those without needing to do anything. It is also far more logical because that is already how we write numbers generally -- from largest to smallest. It's also how we write time, so right at this moment I can write the time as 2013-09-15 09:18:44 and it descends nicely and sensibly. When I first started doing this I found it a little hard to get used to, but I was very surprised at how quickly I came to think of dates this way. It is just so much easier and more natural.
I hope that eventually everyone will adopt reverse-date format. It just makes so much sense... especially now we are all part of a global village.
(Crossposted from http://miriam-e.dreamwidth.org/316211.html at my Dreamwidth account. Number of comments there so far: