Well the US pint is 16 fluid oz which is 1 lb of water. The UK pint is
20 so a pint of water is a pound and a quarter. Go figure.
But since we are on the subject of time, why accept UTC as the basis
for Internet time? Leap seconds are unpredictable and lead to system
errors. The only group with a colorable benefit from leap seconds are
astronomers, the one group that might be expected to be able to fix
leap seconds retrospectively.
The ITU has been discussing plans to abandon leap seconds in
perpetuity, but the astronomers always seem to win in the end. If we
moved from UTC to Internet Time, we could abolish leap seconds.
OK, I am not seriously proposing the IETF try to do this (well not
unless we get into a real fight with the ITU). But if you read some of
the idiotic arguments advanced in favor of introducing random,
unpredictable changes into the measurement of time, they are rather
interesting. There are astronomers who seem to think the earth
revolves around them. There are dire predictions that stopping
fiddling with the time system would be a 'major change'. Every
argument is thrown out, regardless of whether it makes any sense.
People who point out that leap seconds really do cost real money are
poo-pooed as having insignificant importance in such lofty debates.
Quite a few of the protagonists attempt to claim it is only the
ignorance and stupidity of the objectors to leap seconds that makes
them unable to see the reason that they are essential.
Over the course of a year, the length of a day varies by several hours
at this latitude. And the time at which noon occurs varies by several
minutes. And twice a year the state decides that we will all get up an
hour earlier or later. So what benefit are those leap seconds to me?
Absolutely none that I can see.
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 12:18 PM, Iljitsch van Beijnum
<iljitsch(_at_)muada(_dot_)com> wrote:
On 17 mrt 2010, at 17:02, Michael Edward McNeil wrote:
(Although the exposure to non-standard ways of doing things may make this
harder for Americans.)
Since Americans habitually use month-day order anyway, why would YYYY-MM-DD
be especially difficult for them? It's Europeans and others who typically
use day-month order that would seem likely to incur difficulties -- except
that putting the year first is a pretty glaring clue that the order
shouldn't be regarded as it usually is for them.
Absolutely. But Americans don't expect this kind of stuff to make sense,
because they're used to having a different way of measuring everything, while
in the rest of the world we're used to the metric system so we assume things
make sense. So an American wouldn't necessarily consider yyyy-dd-mm
inconceivable while people from elsewhere probably would and just assume
yyyy-mm-dd.
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