Hi,
My father told me that during WWII in London, the 'date problem' was a
constant hazard between the British and the American commands, and that,
as in John Pickard's herbarium, they eventually standardised on using
Roman Numerals for the months.
best wishes,
Peter
On 13/11/2013 10:17 AM, John Pickard wrote:
I couldn't agree more about the confusion Paul. But as an Australian, I find
the US system close to an abomination. But the non-US system(s) will gradually
fade as Bill Gates continues his inexorable Americanisation (i.e.
bastardisation) of the English language, and people are too lazy or stupid to
change the formats to e.g. Australian English and dates rather than accept his
defaults.
For many years I worked in a herbarium where we had plant collections going
back to the 1700s. Dates were always given as day / month / year in an
unambiguous format using roman numerals for month: 13.xi.2013. Because the
collections covered several centuries, the year was never abbreviated to two
digits.
It's not just dates that are confusing, it's also time of day. I can only shake
my head at Virgin Airlines which lists all the departure and arrival times on
their website in 12-hour format, but uses 24-hour on the e-tickets. At least
the new urban public transport timetables released in Sydney a few weeks ago
have changed from 12-hour to 24-hour format.
I have to confess to arriving at Sydney airport for a 6:30 flight, but when I
tried to
check-in, I was told it was only possible 4 hours before departure, and my flight was at
18:30! As Homer J. would say "D'oh!"
Cheers, John
Dr John Pickard
john.pick...@bigpond.com
---- Sunclocks North America <sunclock...@icloud.com> wrote:
=============
This has always been a pet peeve of mine!
All of these differing date formats are confusing, as you can never really be
sure
which one people are using. Here in Canada, it's even worse because some
people put
the month first like in the USA and others put the day first and yet others put
the
year first! Nobody can be sure if something like 10/11/12 means October 11th
2012,
November 10th 2012 or November 12th 2010! At least now that we're in 2013,
some of
that confusion is gone for the next 87 years.
I think that the best way which everyone in the world understands is to start a
four
digit year: yyyy/mm/dd, and all the confusion goes away with the simple
addition of two
characters. Plus the dates can be easily sorted numerically. It's pretty much
the
only date format I ever use unless I spell out the month.
Paul Ratto
SunClocks North America
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Peter Mayer
Discipline of Politics & International Studies (POLIS)
School of History & Politics
http://www.arts.adelaide.edu.au/historypolitics/
The University of Adelaide, AUSTRALIA 5005
Ph : +61 8 8313 5609
Fax : +61 8 8313 3443
e-mail: peter.ma...@adelaide.edu.au
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