Proposal: USians stop using “PST” and “EST” and start saying “UTC-8” and “UTC-5” so I can work out what actual damn time you mean in my head.
Alternately, list local and UTC?
Also it’d be great if you didn’t use “summer” and “winter” as an approximate date. Sincerely, the other hemisphere.
like given *we* don’t use (mathematically-correct) YYYYMMDD I’m willing to cut you some slack on MMDDYYYY but this is where I draw the line.
@ticky Been in US for almost 3 decades now, still not happy with MMDDYYYY. In fact traditionally in astrophysics we do use YYYYMMDD although younger generation seems to do this less alas.
@ticky Don't worry, its use will go down with the coming collapse of the USA.
@planet4589 “former soviet state” : USSR :: ??? : USA
@planet4589 (p.s. IDK the USA has a lot of international English-speaking cultural influence which I suspect won’t just vanish overnight if the union did?)
@ticky Well, yes. DDMMYYYY will survive (or even thrive under the 3rd British Empire) but hopefully the illogical MMDDYYYY will die.
@ticky “former soviet state” : USSR :: "post-Trumpian survivor camps" : USA ?
@planet4589 maybe a little too specific
@planet4589 Anything other than YYYYMMDD is heresy, plain and simple. ISO8601 or bust!
@Autumn Anything other than TDB Julian Day is just playing around.
@planet4589 Uh oh, I had to find the astronomer, didn't I? Yes, you win. :laughing:
@Autumn And in fact for my own work, representing "7.61 billion years ago" in either JD or ISO-8601 is a bit on the clumsy side...
@planet4589 What's "7.61 billion years ago"? Any computer scientist can tell you that time began at zero on January 1, 1970. :)
@Autumn I was just ranting to a colleague the other day about the deep evil of Posix time, especially the way it goes backwards during a leap second.
@planet4589 Yeah, isn't that great? That gets you into ridiculous things like fights between NTP servers that jump a leap second and those that "smear" it.
@Autumn Exactly. Why they couldn't just - even now - move the internet over to a continous timescale like TT or GPS and leave TT-UTC conversion to the user interface, I do not know.
@planet4589 That theory works beautifully one level up — timestamps in UTC rather than local time, and conversion at the display level — so it's strange that there hasn't been a movement to similarly handle continuous time and leap seconds.
I can only imagine the headache, though, of making sure everyone's display layer was using accurate info for leap seconds. It's bad enough when people mess up their time zone settings.
@Autumn ah, fair point
@planet4589 yeah I guess DDMMYYYY is winning. It’s practical I guess but given it’s mathematically backwards I wish it weren’t winning…