mailto: blog -at- heyrick -dot- eu

Yesterday was Pi day...?

The time and date was 3/14/15, 9:26pm.

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.
So, I didn't celebrate Pi day. But I did have a piece of apple pie...

 

 

Your comments:

Please note that while I check this page every so often, I am not able to control what users write; therefore I disclaim all liability for unpleasant and/or infringing and/or defamatory material. Undesired content will be removed as soon as it is noticed. By leaving a comment, you agree not to post material that is illegal or in bad taste, and you should be aware that the time and your IP address are both recorded, should it be necessary to find out who you are. Oh, and don't bother trying to inline HTML. I'm not that stupid! ☺ ADDING COMMENTS DOES NOT WORK IF READING TRANSLATED VERSIONS.
 
You can now follow comment additions with the comment RSS feed. This is distinct from the b.log RSS feed, so you can subscribe to one or both as you wish.

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.

Add a comment (v0.11) [help?] . . . try the comment feed!
Your name
Your email (optional)
Validation Are you real? Please type 69140 backwards.
Your comment
French flagSpanish flagJapanese flag
Calendar
«   March 2015   »
MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
      1
2345678
910121314
1617181921
242526272829
3031     

Advent Calendar 2023
(YouTube playlist)

(Felicity? Marte? Find out!)

Last 5 entries

List all b.log entries

Return to the site index

Geekery

Search

Search Rick's b.log!

PS: Don't try to be clever.
It's a simple substring match.

Etc...

Last read at 10:40 on 2024/03/28.

QR code


Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional
Valid CSS
Valid RSS 2.0

 

© 2015 Rick Murray
This web page is licenced for your personal, private, non-commercial use only. No automated processing by advertising systems is permitted.
RIPA notice: No consent is given for interception of page transmission.

 

Have you noticed the watermarks on pictures?
Next entry - 2015/03/20
Return to top of page