An anonymous reader writes "This week marks the 125th anniversary of the International Meridian Conference, which determined that the prime meridian (i.e., longitude 0 0' 00") would travel through Greenwich, UK. One of the reasons that Greenwich was agreed upon 'was that 72% of the world's shipping already depended on sea charts that used Greenwich as the Prime Meridian.' Sandford Fleming's proposal of a single 24-hour clock for the entire world, located at the center of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian, was rejected / not voted on, as it was felt to be outside the purview of the conference."
Flying Sydney, Australia to California is similar. There have been numerous times when I departed Sydney after lunch on Saturday, spend 14 hours in a plane, then land at San Francisco in time for breakfast on _the same day_.
Amusing chat over IM with a friend one such day:
Them: How's your Saturday? Me: Good, had lunch in Sydney then breakfast in San Francisco after that. Them: wtf???
Watches seem to be becoming popular again, even if only as a fashion accessory, especially for men. Next time you're watching TV, keep an eye out for large, flashy watches; they're very common.
A young rocket scientist named Wright once traveled much faster than light He set out one day, in a relative way and arrived on the previous night
Instead of going through the hassle of upgrading an Orion Project [wikipedia.org] spaceship, all one has to do is fly conventionally from Honolulu to Tokyo. Now they tell me!
Actually, you'd have to set it 24 hours when crossing the 180th. The (theoretical) timezone-limits for +12 and -12 are only 7.5 degrees each, compared to 15 degrees for the all others. Of course in real life, it only crosses land i Russia and Fiji, and they bend the dateline around themselves to avoid this, so this should only happen at sea.
No, timezones are one hour apart and the international date line is the edge between two timezones,...
Dead wrong.
Just look at, no readWikipedia [wikipedia.org]: Most of the IDL is actually in international waters at the 180th meridian and separates the +12:00 time zone from the -12:00 time zone. The difference is 24:00, which is the usual time span of one calendar day.
However, inhabitated land masses and islands tend to have deviations in their time zones, yielding differences between 21 hours (between Russia and Alaska) and 25 hours (between Tonga and International Waters around it).
by Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday October 21, @04:12AM (#29820755)
I wonder how much longer it will take for the US to catch up?
For example, we continue to teach date formatted in a completely nonsense format (MM/DD/YYYY) instead of either high to low (YYYY/MM/DD) or low to high (DD/MM/YYYY) like the rest of the world. Plus using AM/PM instead of 24 hour ("Military Time") again like the rest of the civilised world.
Don't even get me started on our lack of metric....
It seems at least Slashdot is not behind, I think that I have noticed before that mod points are attributed/expired at 0 hour UTC, 4 or 5 hours before midnight EDT/EST !;-))
Most likely you only think "feet" are better than "meters" in D&D because you're used to imperial units and they feel more "natural" to you. As someone who grew up in a country where inches and feet are units only used when dealing with things imported directly from the US I always have to stop and think for a second when trying to remember how long "five feet" is, or how heavy something that is "150 pounds" really is, and don't get me started on the British use of "stones" for weight...
While a longsword's [wikipedia.org] reach is about 5', that includes the arm that wields it. Longswords are about 4' in overall length, with around 3' of blade. That rope would be 7-1/2 longswords, or 10 longsword-blades.:)
Quickly, convert from 1234 kiloinch to miles! The beauty of the metric system is that there is one unit for distance, which is a meter. All others are just prefixes. A kilometer is just a kilo meters, so 1000 meters. All you have to do is move the decimal point. With the imperial system, going from the small distance unit (inch) to the large one (miles) requires a lot of conversion. And then you have a third, medium unit called the feet, just to make it a little more unwieldy.
Seriously, the metric system has a lot going for it in some ways, but is harder in others. For example, while 10 is a great multiplier (since we tend to think in base 10), it doesn't have a lot of factors.
You miss the point. The advantage of using the same base across all measurements is not merely that it goes well with the digits we use, but it means different type of measurements work well together. A cubic meter works out to exactly a thousand liters, which when filled with water would weigh 1 metric tonne, which is 1 thousand kilograms. The pressure of 10 metres of water works out to 1 atmosphere, which is approximately 100,000 Pascal, which is 100,000 Newtons per square meter. At sea level the acceleration due to gravity is approximately 10 M/s so 1kg is roughly 10 newtons worth of weight. If you have a force of 1 Newton over 1 meter , you get 1 joule worth of energy, which is the energy drawn per second by 1 ampere of electric current at an electric potential of 1 volt.
Now, lets say you have a pool of water that is 10 feet deep and 10x20 yards by the sides. You want an electric engine operating at 230V to drive a pump that can empty the pool through a pipe that has a diameter of 3inches. The drain is at ground level. You don't want to leave it on unsupervised at night so you want it to take no more than 2 hours. How many amperes of current will your engine draw? What's the total amount of energy necessary to empty the pool? How much pressure does the pump have to handle?
I would STRONGLY suggest you convert to SI units before trying to solve that problem.
It was a good decision. There's no YYYY-DD-MM notation so it's not going to get confused with that. It also means a simple alphanumeric sort will sort the date correctly, a decent number of people in the world (Mostly in China and Japan) are already familiar with the notation, and it maintains logical consistency if you put 24 hour time after it (YYYY-MM-DD-hh:mm:ss)
by Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday October 21, @04:51AM (#29820937)
People in other English speaking countries say it correctly too (e.g. "[the] first of April two thousand and ten"). Americans say it wrong because they write it wrong.
That's why I use ISO dates. Either 2010-04-01 or 20010401 or 2010.04.01 or 2010/04/01, optionally followed by a hh:mm:ss.ms timestamp. They have the wonderful property that (so long as the separators are consistent) the dates are correctly sorted by simple string comparisons!
Hooray for date formats where the digits are in most-to-least-significant order...
Really, native English speakers shouldn't be chauvenistic [sic] about the fact the rest of the world is speaking their language, they should be ashamed by their inability to accomodate [sic] other cultures, and humbled by the fact other people go through the length of learning theirs.
The difficulty for native, American English speakers is, which other language does one learn? (Native American, English speakers have their own set of problems.:-) ) In high school and college I took Spanish, and became relatively proficient at speaking, reading, and writing it. In my first job, though, I spent five or so years working closely with Japanese, took Japanese language classes, and got relatively proficient at speaking it, too -- but my Spanish suffered terribly. Then my job changed, and I went instead to Germany. I got moderately proficient in German, but lost practice in Japanese (to say nothing of my Spanish). I then returned to the US, in an environment where foreign language skills are of absolutely no value at all.
I'm now in a situation where I remember three foreign languages poorly, interchange words and syntax between them with embarrassing frequency and, after what seems like a lifetime of learning languages and accommodating other cultures, can only speak English fluently. What have I accomplished? I worked hard at learning my coworkers' and customers' languages, largely because I didn't want to feel chauvinistic about others' use of English, but couldn't get enough life-long practice in each to become and/or remain fluent.
I am totally impressed with anyone who learns English as a second language -- I'm sure there's a language somewhere with more exceptions to its rules, but I'm unaware of it -- but, as a lingua franca it's usually clear that English is the language to learn. It's less clear which language a native English speaker should learn.
French is a useful and underrated language. It's the most predominant language on the European continent in areas without good English speakers. In my experience, native Italians are ok at English, the Spanish and Portuguese are great, but the French are very poor (I'm less sure about Eastern Europe). German is practically English already.
It's also an official language of international diplomacy (it comes *before* Spanish translations on US Passports), and is spoken in a lot of North African and Caribbean nations, so you have more places available to comfortably vacation =)
English is considered by linguists to be one of the hardest languages to learn, because it doesn't really follow any of its own rules.
I'd really like to know where you are getting that from; I've heard that sentiment before, but only from native English speakers.
As someone who had to learn English (and attempted a few others), I can tell you that it's far and away one of the easiest languages you can learn (assuming your native language is somewhere in the Indo-European family).
Honestly, I get it from being a former military linguist and studying various languages. The US military/State department testing for languages puts English as a category 5, most of the romance and Slavic languages (a couple exceptions) as category 2 or 3 and many of the Asian languages (that use different alphabets) and middle eastern (Arabic, Hebrew, a couple of others) as category 4. I don't remember any category 1 languages.
These categories are based on simplicity and consistency of the rules for grammar, spelling, etc. They also take into account (as I understand it) difficulty of pronunciation. Korean, for example is a category 4 language. It is a phonetic language though, so once you learn the alphabet it's fairly easy to sound out any word. English, on the other hand, has horrible consistency of spelling and phonetics. Two, to, too; hear, heard; tear (cry), tear (rip); etc etc.
I am a native English speaker. I've studied French, German, Korean, Chinese, a little bit of Japanese, a little bit of Spanish and dabbled briefly with Tagalog. For me, the most difficult has been Chinese, with French, Spanish, and Tagalog being the easiest. I can't speak to any difficulty learning English because I was reading novels at age 4 and don't remember any issues with the language. My "English is considered difficult" is based entirely on my study of other languages, the test mentioned above, and my experiences living with and dealing with other languages and their native speakers.
That's because of the George M. Cohan song "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" [lyricsplayground.com] which includes the line "... born on the 4th of July."
The tablet [wikipedia.org] that the Statue of Liberty is holding says, "July IV, MDCCLXXVI". I've always known it as Independence Day or July [the] 4th.
Also, the written form Americans use causes a lot of confusion when dealing with non-Americans who use yyyy-mm-dd, dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd.
Why the hell do you think we do it?
You know we work REALLY REALLY hard to piss you guys off.. I mean we even elected a NICE president this time around just so we could fuck with you and elect Hitler next time... And yes I do mean "The Hitler". He flew out on that last plane that took off from the street right outside the bunker right before the Ruskies took it. We picked him up a few days later trying to enter Sweden. Apparently he had a bunch of gold in some bank there or something, who knows... Anyway we've had to replace most of his body over the years with alien implants we got from the Roswell crash but still you guys are just going to FREAK!
Hummmm, I wonder what you will think when we start a third war on terror, involving our own terror campaign... We like to call it... Where on earth did those Yankees hide that Hydrogen Bomb!
by Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday October 21, @05:31AM (#29821133)
Saying "April 1st" feels more natural to English-speaking people than "1st of April" for the same reason that saying "blue car" feels more natural than "car of blue". It's because we put adjectives before nouns, while in e.g. French it's the opposite, and explains why they prefer to say "1er Avril".
Are you trying to claim that Americans say "April 1st" because April is an adjective? April is a noun. The reason that non-American English speakers say "1st of April" is because it's the "1st [day] of April". When you put it like that, "April 1st" sounds weird.
It boils down to the fact that what your used to is what sounds natural to you. There are many examples of very odd constructions in English that seem natural only because they are familiar.
This is yet another "it's not what I'm used to hearing, therefore it's wrong/inferior" argument. (Fahrenheit versus Celcius springs to mind)
Are you trying to claim that Americans say "April 1st" because April is an adjective? April is a noun.
Actually, I think you're wrong. Months DO get used in adjective form quite a bit: "November rain", "May flowers", "June bugs", "April showers", etc! We tend to think of the month as modifying things. Today is the 21st, and is an October 21st.
For example, we continue to teach date formatted in a completely nonsense format (MM/DD/YYYY) instead of either high to low (YYYY/MM/DD) or low to high (DD/MM/YYYY) like the rest of the world.
While the AC got modded "Troll", he/she has got a point, expressed in narrow terms, which I'd like to expand at the risk of being Offtopic: Why is it so difficult to standardize things from place to place?
- Video. The PAL standard is better quality than NTSC (Never The Same Color), so why did the Americas adopt an inferior option? - Voltages. Being asthmatic, my wife took her nebulizer on a recent trip to Europe and within ten seconds busted our converter. We busted another one before ordering a special-delivery converter for medium-sized devices, the whole escapade setting us back about 180 CHF. - Car filters. Working at a company that distributes car stuff, a trip to the warehouse is an eye opener, there's over 1,500 types of just oil filters, the difference between some of them being half a millimeter in circumference. Add windshield wipers (also windshields, for that matter), engine bands, tires (or tyres for all you Britons, cheers mate), fuses, and I wonder why no institution has put an end to this nonsense, like the API (American Petroleum Institute) did with engine oils (BTW, a shining example of standardization success). - Keyboards. Even in Western nations, configurations change however slightly, so that a QWERTY in the USA is a QWERTZ in Switzerland, then another thing in Spain, etc, which tends to REALLY slow down typing speed. - DVDs. Take away the PAL and NTSC thing, and you've still got to deal with the DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-DL+R, DVD-DL-R, DVD-DD+R, DVD-DL-R, the majority not compatible with all burners, drives and/or players. - Steering wheel/Street flow. Some do it on the left side, some do it on the right side. WHY???
Best comic strip I've read in the last few months is from Spain, shows some exhausted dude being compared to Sisyphus [wikipedia.org]: - "Seven years of toil, but I've finally ripped, subtitled and uploaded all the world's DVDs to the Internet, with cover jpgs and all". Then the guy points a gun to his head as an off-voice says: - "Now stick them all up your ass, 'cause here comes High Definition, Blu-Ray, HDD and whatever the fuck else".
End of rant.
Back on topic, whoever ruled the Seven Seas first, got to do the homework and implement a practical system of navigation, and at the time it was the British, so I have to tip my hat to them, they did a bloody good job at it, as it still stands to the day and really needs no revision. Leave it at Greenwich, or as it's known in time circles, Coordinated Universal Time.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson did a gentleman's job at explaining the concept during a lecture available on the web: - The Greeks named the constellations (while inventing the concept), so we still use the Greek names for them. - The great Islamic culture of a thousand years ago named the visible stars, so we still use the Arab names (Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka, Rigel and Betelgeuse, to name a few just from Orion). FWIW, my favorite star name is the tip of the Big Dipper's handle - Al Kaid, which means "leader of the mourning maidens". - The Brits invented the modern system of correspondence and postage, so their stamp is the only one that does not specify the country of origin, to this day. - The North Americans invented the Internet, so USA websites are dot-com, while the rest of the world uses dot-com-dot-suffix.
All I'm saying is, in a modern world with thousands of pockets of eccentric engineers, it's comforting to find examples of global standardization, and the time zones is one of them.
- Video. The PAL standard is better quality than NTSC (Never The Same Color), so why did the Americas adopt an inferior option?
That's sort of like asking why we adopted the clearly inferior analog STDV standard instead of digital HDTV. NTSC was standardized in 1953, PAL was not standardized until 1963. Naturally, PAL was the superior standard...it was based around technology that was ten years more advanced.
he proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world, located at the centre of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian.
I have tried finding a reference to this and can't. What does it mean by being located at center of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian? Time zones are linked to surface meridian's right? So how would a system work that was not linked to anyplace on the surface?
It's called Riyadh Solar Time - look it up. It last one year year before they realised how much of a pain in the arse it was. Also, Japan used to have per-city time zones in five-minute increments, and that was a real pain for doing business, or calculating journey travel/arrival times. Discrete time zones for relatively large areas are just more practical in general.
Happy birthday to 180th meridian too ! (Score:5, Informative)
And don't forget the 180th meridian that came with it. When you cross the 180th meridian, you have to set your watch back/forward 23 hours !
Quite a few people are unaware of it ;-))
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1919PA.....27..416F [harvard.edu]
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Re:Happy birthday to 180th meridian too ! (Score:5, Funny)
I recently flew from LA to Fiji. On the way forward, you land two days after departure, on the way back, you land at the same time you departed...
It's pretty disturbing.
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Re:Happy birthday to 180th meridian too ! (Score:4, Interesting)
Flying Sydney, Australia to California is similar. There have been numerous times when I departed Sydney after lunch on Saturday, spend 14 hours in a plane, then land at San Francisco in time for breakfast on _the same day_.
Amusing chat over IM with a friend one such day:
Them: How's your Saturday?
Me: Good, had lunch in Sydney then breakfast in San Francisco after that.
Them: wtf???
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Re:Happy birthday to 180th meridian too ! (Score:4, Funny)
Aaron: Man, I'm starving. I haven't eaten since later this afternoon.
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Reminds me of that limerick:
A young rocket scientist named Wright
once traveled much faster than light
He set out one day, in a relative way
and arrived on the previous night
Instead of going through the hassle of upgrading an Orion Project [wikipedia.org] spaceship, all one has to do is fly conventionally from Honolulu to Tokyo.
Now they tell me!
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No, timezones are one hour apart and the international date line is the edge between two timezones,...
Dead wrong.
Just look at, no read Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: Most of the IDL is actually in international waters at the 180th meridian and separates the +12:00 time zone from the -12:00 time zone. The difference is 24:00, which is the usual time span of one calendar day.
However, inhabitated land masses and islands tend to have deviations in their time zones, yielding differences between 21 hours (between Russia and Alaska) and 25 hours (between Tonga and International Waters around it).
I'm a Greenwich resident (Score:3, Interesting)
125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how much longer it will take for the US to catch up?
For example, we continue to teach date formatted in a completely nonsense format (MM/DD/YYYY) instead of either high to low (YYYY/MM/DD) or low to high (DD/MM/YYYY) like the rest of the world. Plus using AM/PM instead of 24 hour ("Military Time") again like the rest of the civilised world.
Don't even get me started on our lack of metric....
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Funny)
We're currently 5-10 hours behind, not too far, but we don't seem to be gaining.
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It seems at least Slashdot is not behind, I think that I have noticed before that mod points are attributed/expired at 0 hour UTC, 4 or 5 hours before midnight EDT/EST ! ;-))
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Funny)
The distance between the US and Greenwich is increasing, so continental drift will only make it worse.
I hear congress is going to pass a law to correct this...
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Don't even get me started on our lack of metric....
But you have a beautiful metric, in bodyparts!
It's perfect for D&D. "I advance five feet" is much more immersive than "I advance two meters".
Pity that you didn't make a corresponding time system replacing seconds, hours and days by heartbeats, digestions and bodyrottings.
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most likely you only think "feet" are better than "meters" in D&D because you're used to imperial units and they feel more "natural" to you. As someone who grew up in a country where inches and feet are units only used when dealing with things imported directly from the US I always have to stop and think for a second when trying to remember how long "five feet" is, or how heavy something that is "150 pounds" really is, and don't get me started on the British use of "stones" for weight...
/Mikael
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Funny)
I always have to stop and think for a second when trying to remember how long "five feet" is,
What's to remember? Five feet is the reach of your longsword.
And I don't care where you live, you should always carry a longsword.
And 30 feet of rope.
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, of course! It just doesn't sound the same when one says "I wouldn't touch that with a 3-meter pole."
You mean: "I wouldn't touch that with a 3-meter american".
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:4, Funny)
No, he's talking about length, not girth.
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Re:It's because meters and feet are the same (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly you're not a woodworker. Small measurements are where the metric system shines... large measurements people just estimate anyway.
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Re:It's because meters and feet are the same (Score:5, Insightful)
You miss the point. The advantage of using the same base across all measurements is not merely that it goes well with the digits we use, but it means different type of measurements work well together. A cubic meter works out to exactly a thousand liters, which when filled with water would weigh 1 metric tonne, which is 1 thousand kilograms. The pressure of 10 metres of water works out to 1 atmosphere, which is approximately 100,000 Pascal, which is 100,000 Newtons per square meter. At sea level the acceleration due to gravity is approximately 10 M/s so 1kg is roughly 10 newtons worth of weight. If you have a force of 1 Newton over 1 meter , you get 1 joule worth of energy, which is the energy drawn per second by 1 ampere of electric current at an electric potential of 1 volt.
Now, lets say you have a pool of water that is 10 feet deep and 10x20 yards by the sides. You want an electric engine operating at 230V to drive a pump that can empty the pool through a pipe that has a diameter of 3inches. The drain is at ground level. You don't want to leave it on unsupervised at night so you want it to take no more than 2 hours. How many amperes of current will your engine draw? What's the total amount of energy necessary to empty the pool? How much pressure does the pump have to handle?
I would STRONGLY suggest you convert to SI units before trying to solve that problem.
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:4, Insightful)
While MM/DD/YYYY seems illogical, it maps exactly to the way you say it - April 1st, 2010 = 04/01/2010
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
And if I say "1st of April, 2010"?
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
While MM/DD/YYYY seems illogical, it maps exactly to the way you say it - April 1st, 2010 = 04/01/2010
uhm alot of people think in languages other than US English
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
People in other English speaking countries say it correctly too (e.g. "[the] first of April two thousand and ten"). Americans say it wrong because they write it wrong.
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why I use ISO dates. Either 2010-04-01 or 20010401 or 2010.04.01 or 2010/04/01, optionally followed by a hh:mm:ss.ms timestamp. They have the wonderful property that (so long as the separators are consistent) the dates are correctly sorted by simple string comparisons!
Hooray for date formats where the digits are in most-to-least-significant order...
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
The difficulty for native, American English speakers is, which other language does one learn? (Native American, English speakers have their own set of problems. :-) ) In high school and college I took Spanish, and became relatively proficient at speaking, reading, and writing it. In my first job, though, I spent five or so years working closely with Japanese, took Japanese language classes, and got relatively proficient at speaking it, too -- but my Spanish suffered terribly. Then my job changed, and I went instead to Germany. I got moderately proficient in German, but lost practice in Japanese (to say nothing of my Spanish). I then returned to the US, in an environment where foreign language skills are of absolutely no value at all.
I'm now in a situation where I remember three foreign languages poorly, interchange words and syntax between them with embarrassing frequency and, after what seems like a lifetime of learning languages and accommodating other cultures, can only speak English fluently. What have I accomplished? I worked hard at learning my coworkers' and customers' languages, largely because I didn't want to feel chauvinistic about others' use of English, but couldn't get enough life-long practice in each to become and/or remain fluent.
I am totally impressed with anyone who learns English as a second language -- I'm sure there's a language somewhere with more exceptions to its rules, but I'm unaware of it -- but, as a lingua franca it's usually clear that English is the language to learn. It's less clear which language a native English speaker should learn.
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:4, Informative)
It's also an official language of international diplomacy (it comes *before* Spanish translations on US Passports), and is spoken in a lot of North African and Caribbean nations, so you have more places available to comfortably vacation =)
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I'd really like to know where you are getting that from; I've heard that sentiment before, but only from native English speakers.
As someone who had to learn English (and attempted a few others), I can tell you that it's far and away one of the easiest languages you can learn (assuming your native language is somewhere in the Indo-European family).
English can't really
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, I get it from being a former military linguist and studying various languages. The US military/State department testing for languages puts English as a category 5, most of the romance and Slavic languages (a couple exceptions) as category 2 or 3 and many of the Asian languages (that use different alphabets) and middle eastern (Arabic, Hebrew, a couple of others) as category 4. I don't remember any category 1 languages.
These categories are based on simplicity and consistency of the rules for grammar, spelling, etc. They also take into account (as I understand it) difficulty of pronunciation. Korean, for example is a category 4 language. It is a phonetic language though, so once you learn the alphabet it's fairly easy to sound out any word. English, on the other hand, has horrible consistency of spelling and phonetics. Two, to, too; hear, heard; tear (cry), tear (rip); etc etc.
I am a native English speaker. I've studied French, German, Korean, Chinese, a little bit of Japanese, a little bit of Spanish and dabbled briefly with Tagalog. For me, the most difficult has been Chinese, with French, Spanish, and Tagalog being the easiest. I can't speak to any difficulty learning English because I was reading novels at age 4 and don't remember any issues with the language. My "English is considered difficult" is based entirely on my study of other languages, the test mentioned above, and my experiences living with and dealing with other languages and their native speakers.
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet you have a holiday called the Fourth of July...
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:4, Informative)
That's because of the George M. Cohan song "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" [lyricsplayground.com] which includes the line "... born on the 4th of July."
The tablet [wikipedia.org] that the Statue of Liberty is holding says, "July IV, MDCCLXXVI". I've always known it as Independence Day or July [the] 4th.
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Funny)
Also, the written form Americans use causes a lot of confusion when dealing with non-Americans who use yyyy-mm-dd, dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd.
Why the hell do you think we do it?
You know we work REALLY REALLY hard to piss you guys off.. I mean we even elected a NICE president this time around just so we could fuck with you and elect Hitler next time... And yes I do mean "The Hitler". He flew out on that last plane that took off from the street right outside the bunker right before the Ruskies took it. We picked him up a few days later trying to enter Sweden. Apparently he had a bunch of gold in some bank there or something, who knows... Anyway we've had to replace most of his body over the years with alien implants we got from the Roswell crash but still you guys are just going to FREAK!
Hummmm, I wonder what you will think when we start a third war on terror, involving our own terror campaign... We like to call it... Where on earth did those Yankees hide that Hydrogen Bomb!
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying "April 1st" feels more natural to English-speaking people
Not to *this* English speaker. Some English speakers come from places other than the US.
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Interesting)
Saying "April 1st" feels more natural to English-speaking people than "1st of April" for the same reason that saying "blue car" feels more natural than "car of blue". It's because we put adjectives before nouns, while in e.g. French it's the opposite, and explains why they prefer to say "1er Avril".
Are you trying to claim that Americans say "April 1st" because April is an adjective? April is a noun. The reason that non-American English speakers say "1st of April" is because it's the "1st [day] of April". When you put it like that, "April 1st" sounds weird.
It boils down to the fact that what your used to is what sounds natural to you. There are many examples of very odd constructions in English that seem natural only because they are familiar.
This is yet another "it's not what I'm used to hearing, therefore it's wrong/inferior" argument. (Fahrenheit versus Celcius springs to mind)
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Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I think you're wrong. Months DO get used in adjective form quite a bit: "November rain", "May flowers", "June bugs", "April showers", etc! We tend to think of the month as modifying things. Today is the 21st, and is an October 21st.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Do you have any idea what that would do to the March Pi Day [wikipedia.org]?
Re:125 MORE years until the US gets time... (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, we continue to teach date formatted in a completely nonsense format (MM/DD/YYYY) instead of either high to low (YYYY/MM/DD) or low to high (DD/MM/YYYY) like the rest of the world.
While the AC got modded "Troll", he/she has got a point, expressed in narrow terms, which I'd like to expand at the risk of being Offtopic: Why is it so difficult to standardize things from place to place?
- Video. The PAL standard is better quality than NTSC (Never The Same Color), so why did the Americas adopt an inferior option?
- Voltages. Being asthmatic, my wife took her nebulizer on a recent trip to Europe and within ten seconds busted our converter. We busted another one before ordering a special-delivery converter for medium-sized devices, the whole escapade setting us back about 180 CHF.
- Car filters. Working at a company that distributes car stuff, a trip to the warehouse is an eye opener, there's over 1,500 types of just oil filters, the difference between some of them being half a millimeter in circumference. Add windshield wipers (also windshields, for that matter), engine bands, tires (or tyres for all you Britons, cheers mate), fuses, and I wonder why no institution has put an end to this nonsense, like the API (American Petroleum Institute) did with engine oils (BTW, a shining example of standardization success).
- Keyboards. Even in Western nations, configurations change however slightly, so that a QWERTY in the USA is a QWERTZ in Switzerland, then another thing in Spain, etc, which tends to REALLY slow down typing speed.
- DVDs. Take away the PAL and NTSC thing, and you've still got to deal with the DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-DL+R, DVD-DL-R, DVD-DD+R, DVD-DL-R, the majority not compatible with all burners, drives and/or players.
- Steering wheel/Street flow. Some do it on the left side, some do it on the right side. WHY???
Best comic strip I've read in the last few months is from Spain, shows some exhausted dude being compared to Sisyphus [wikipedia.org]:
- "Seven years of toil, but I've finally ripped, subtitled and uploaded all the world's DVDs to the Internet, with cover jpgs and all".
Then the guy points a gun to his head as an off-voice says:
- "Now stick them all up your ass, 'cause here comes High Definition, Blu-Ray, HDD and whatever the fuck else".
End of rant.
Back on topic, whoever ruled the Seven Seas first, got to do the homework and implement a practical system of navigation, and at the time it was the British, so I have to tip my hat to them, they did a bloody good job at it, as it still stands to the day and really needs no revision. Leave it at Greenwich, or as it's known in time circles, Coordinated Universal Time.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson did a gentleman's job at explaining the concept during a lecture available on the web:
- The Greeks named the constellations (while inventing the concept), so we still use the Greek names for them.
- The great Islamic culture of a thousand years ago named the visible stars, so we still use the Arab names (Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka, Rigel and Betelgeuse, to name a few just from Orion). FWIW, my favorite star name is the tip of the Big Dipper's handle - Al Kaid, which means "leader of the mourning maidens".
- The Brits invented the modern system of correspondence and postage, so their stamp is the only one that does not specify the country of origin, to this day.
- The North Americans invented the Internet, so USA websites are dot-com, while the rest of the world uses dot-com-dot-suffix.
All I'm saying is, in a modern world with thousands of pockets of eccentric engineers, it's comforting to find examples of global standardization, and the time zones is one of them.
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NTSC came much earlier. (Score:5, Informative)
- Video. The PAL standard is better quality than NTSC (Never The Same Color), so why did the Americas adopt an inferior option?
That's sort of like asking why we adopted the clearly inferior analog STDV standard instead of digital HDTV. NTSC was standardized in 1953, PAL was not standardized until 1963. Naturally, PAL was the superior standard...it was based around technology that was ten years more advanced.
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Not true for WGS84 (Score:3, Informative)
It is worth noting that in the coordinate system most used today (WGS84), this is no longer true.
See this [googlesightseeing.com] explenation or check google maps.
Re:Not true for WGS84 (Score:5, Informative)
Your link says nothing at all about WGS84. Here is one that does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Geodetic_System [wikipedia.org]
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WTF?? (Score:3, Insightful)
I have tried finding a reference to this and can't. What does it mean by being located at center of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian? Time zones are linked to surface meridian's right? So how would a system work that was not linked to anyplace on the surface?
Saudi Arabia tried that (Score:5, Interesting)
It's called Riyadh Solar Time - look it up. It last one year year before they realised how much of a pain in the arse it was. Also, Japan used to have per-city time zones in five-minute increments, and that was a real pain for doing business, or calculating journey travel/arrival times. Discrete time zones for relatively large areas are just more practical in general.
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Re:We still live in the past (Score:5, Insightful)
stores [open] 3 hours before local midday
You imply that the entire population can consistently and correctly subtract 3 from a number.
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