this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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I work with Americans and this hits home hard. It's especially infuriating when they format their dates. "I had a meeting with so-and-so on 4/5" and nobody has any fucking clue what they mean.
The worst part is how hopelessly oblivious they are about it. It's not even like they don't care that nobody does things their stupid way - it's the fact that they're so insulated that they can't even fathom that nobody does things the same way they do. It just goes to show how clueless they are about the rest of the world and how little they get out of their neighborhoods.
It drives me mad. At this point, it's just offensive how ignorant they can be sometimes. If you have to work with other people, you should at least make an effort to be aware of the fact that others do things a different way and try to avoid situations like this, but they just refuse to do so.
Apologies... /rant
I'm American and always use 30 Dec 2023 as my date scheme. It makes much more sense. I also work in a multicultural laboratory, so there should be no question as to what date it is, but some of my colleagues still use mm-dd-yy.
That makes it even worse. When the date uses slashes I expect it to be American, but with dashes anything other than yyyy-mm-dd doesn't even read as a date to me
Nah. I'm British, and today is 31/12/2023. We use slashes. American's are just wrong.
Thanks, I appreciate it! I also try to use the name of the month instead of the number as frequently as possible. To be honest, it's not really the order of the fields that matters - format it whichever way makes you happy! Just make sure it's not ambiguous so other people can tell what you mean. And be aware that not everyone interprets things the same way you do
Like the American below, I generally use 30-December 2023 partly because I work with an international company but mostly because after the century rolled over and we had years that looked like months I got confused.
Had a boss that formatted all dates as YYYY-MM-DD because that makes them sort correctly in lists.
That's how you know it's the correct date format
I work in an international company too! And yet, this confusion persists :-/
I also format everything YYYY-MM-DD for my personal use too. When writing prose, usually some other format is just fine, but I really would love if everyone did year-month-day
Everyone should be using ISO8601 anyway. yyyy-mm-dd is superior to both and leaves 0 ambiguity to the reader no matter where they're from.
Besides the dates, I also still don't know if 12am is noon or midnight. Do Americans know? Is there a problem with simply counting to 24?
12:00AM is midnight because AM is morning, and it's the beginning of the morning.
Using 12-hour time is just a historical artifact from all our analog clocks having 12 hours on their face and not wanting to have to add 12 to the number on the clock for half the day.
That doesn’t make it less confusing, it’s the beginnng of the morning but uses the highest available number.
Where I'm from, 12:00 a.m. (00:00) is the middle of the night (we call it midnight here), and morning begins when the sun rises (and we say "good morning" during our mornings).
Put more specifically, A.M. and P.M. are abbreviations for "ante meridiem" and "post meridiem", which are Latin for "before mid-day" and "after mid-day" respectively. Since a new day begins at midnight, it follows that midnight is 12:00 A.M. since it's the 12 o'clock that is before mid-day.
Yes, it makes perfect sense to count our hours as such:
12, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
/s
12AM is midnight. As for the other part I have this mind blowing concept for you, our culture is not the same as yours. We have our own ways of doing things, just like you.
Why should anyone cut time in two zones? How does it help or benefit anyone? If anything, it only serves to add extra confusion. In the era of electronic time keeping, there is a wonderful opportunity to ditch an extremely stupid decision that was proliferated by analog clocks.
We have 24 hours in a day, just count them one by one. Boom. Problem solved. No confusion, no complications, no nothing.
PM is evening, AM is morning.
I prefer 24hr time but 12hr is not confusing
Exactly and it's such a minor thing to bitch about, I understand the date system frustration but over using AM/PM vs 24?
The notations can be confusing, especially around noon and midnight. Is midnight am or pm when it's equally distant to both the previous and the next noon? Why does 12am not follow 11am???
Where I live we use 12hr time in casual spoken language but pretty much always specify the time of day as well, like eight in the evening or twelve at midnight. But for anything written or even remotely formal, 24h time is used for obvious reasons.
Where I'm from, 12:00 a.m. (00:00) is the middle of the night (we call it midnight here), and morning begins when the sun rises (and we say "good morning" during our mornings).
So if you worked at a hotel or airport or a coffee shop or something and you saw someone shortly before sunrise you would say "Good night" not "Good morning"?
Not all languages work the same way as English does. You shouldn't think in English terms in this case. His language may use hello as a rule in these situations or have a completely different word without equivalent in English.
Agreed. I've never understood the logic of splitting the hours of the day in half. 1800 is so much nicer than 6PM.
I don't think that's purely an American thing though. If I had to guess, I'd say that most of the world uses 12-hour clocks instead of 24-hours. I could be wrong though. Nevertheless, I usually write all times in 24-hour format. But it always sounds awkward trying to use it in speech. I haven't figured out a good way to do that yet.
Thailand splits theri days in 4 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_six-hour_clock)
Please, correct the link, cause now it has closing bracket included.
On substance - even that makes more sense, with 4 zones designating morning, afternoon, evening, and night. 2 zones conflate them.
heck even inside these borders.. the concept of timezones blows their minds at work lol..
them: "yeah let's set a meeting at 9am!"
me: eastern? pacific? central? help me... heeeelllp meee
Yes, we'll have the meeting on 3/2/2023
And I'm like.... FUCK. I'll have to ask again.
And get answered like: "2nd of March, DUH"
I hate when software is hard coded either those stupid fucking dates. I generally uninstall
Oh god or when you can choose between 4/5/23 or 5/4/23 and your like.... '_'
I do everything like this 2023-12-24
Isn't basing a temperature scale on the freezing and boiling points of water a bit arbitrary in and of itself?
The reason they are arbitrary numbers in Fahrenheit is because they weren't considerations when the scale was made.
Water is everywhere.
Cooking, weather, etc. You are also water.
Except that water boils at different temperatures when exposed to different amounts of pressure.
So this works pretty universally on earth.... Near the ground/ocean level (plus or minus a few hundred meters). Once you get outside of that specific condition the numbers move.
So yes, fairly arbitrary.
Let's all switch to Kelvin.
The nice thing about celcius and kelvin is that they're the same scale, but celcius is just shifted 273.15 units. And it's more intuitive for humans to work with smaller numbers with bigger relative differences. But yes, kelvin would be a lot better to work with, especially considering stuff like doubling temperature (doubling energy) would actually work correctly in kelvin.
But if there's one thing that makes a lot of sense to base temperature enough for human use, I would indeed say it's water, because all life uses water, we are completely surrounded by it, and it's super important to nearly everything we do too.
Sure, but the vast majority of people live in low lying areas and even then it doesn't shift that drastically. You need to climb a mountain to see the difference when it comes to applications of daily life.
Although now that I think about it. The same criticism applies to pretty much every definition of temperature that is based on the behaviour of matter. This also applies to Kelvin. Temperature is a property of matter and every type of matter behaves differently.
It is, but if you look at how Farenheit was conceived it's absurdly nonsensical. 0°F is the freezing temperature or some mixture of chemicals, and 90°F is a guess at human body temperature lmao.
And the freezing/boiling points of water are arbitrary except in that they are used to actually define both scales. They provide easily measurable standards.
Well TECHNICALLY it's not based on the state change of water.
It's based on the formula C = K - 273.15 where K = 1.380649×10^−23 / (6.62607015×10^−34)(9192631770) * h * Δν[Cs] / k where k is the Boltzmann constant (1.380649×10^−23 J * K^-1), h is the Planck constant, and Δν[Cs] is the hyperfine transition frequency of Caesium
So even MORE abstract and unrelatable
Every scale and unit is, ultimately, arbitrary. We all do have a very good understanding of what freezing and boiling water is, though, we don't have a good intuition of "coldest day in some random place in some random year" is. Then there's a couple of other common points of orientation: 20C is room temperature, 37C body temperature and thus warm baths and "it's too bloody hot outside" hover around that (you actually want wet-bulb temperature for that, but it's still a point of orientation), another point is about 60C which is the hottest you can have a beverage and drink it without excessive slurping. Also a common temperature in cooking as that's when a lot of stuff starts to denature, e.g. egg white is about 62-65C, the temperature you want to hit for carbonara to not get scrambled eggs.
Practically everything we deal with in everyday life (short of winter weather) is within that 0-100 range. Which is due, to, well, water being liquid in that range.
If you want to be radical, use Kelvin. At least it scaled identical to C so it's easy to comprehend.
I would like to dump on America for this but as Scotland is in the UK we have some unholy abomination of in between when it comes to our measurements.