But Pi Day doesn’t end with the day. There can be Pi Hour, Pi Minute, Pi Second, Pi Milisec…
This was waaay too low
Do NOT give my one Daughter anymore ideas than she already has!
But then we’d have to deal with the savage barbarism of writing it with the day before the month.
Going by the numbers, using DD/MM is the civilised way and MM/DD the archaic one.
then write the year before the month before the day 😈
Always do
Half the fucking world would beg to differ
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_date_formats_by_country#Usage_map
Speaking as someone from a blue country on that map. Most of the world is wrong though. The ISO standard is designed that way for a reason. Not putting the largest unit first is just silly.
Personally I can get behind YMD and DMY (while sticking to ISO would be preferrable for obvious reasons), but what on earth possessed people to come up with MDY?
I have no idea why it started that way, but in everyday speech we say dates with the month first. So that makes MDY just the thing everybody is used to.
Fortunately the ISO format YYYY-MM-DD still has the month before the day, so I don’t have to worry about my fellow Americans getting it confused.
You know, I thought about it after reading the comments here, and I’ve thought of one possible explanation for MM-DD-YYYY, that being the order you effectively get the useful information from a date.
Going by DD-MM-YYYY, you read the first part, and that tells you the day in a month, but not which month, just skimming that first section gives you no actually useful information about how near or far it is without reading the second.
Doing MM-DD-YYYY on the other hand, you first read the month, which immediately tells you what part of a year it is, and if it’s relatively sooner or later, and then reading the second part of the date just gives more precision, rather than the whole useful answer.
So basically, it makes it easier to skim dates within a year with more useful information listed first, whereas putting the year first would just delay or offset that same skimming method.
Day first gives a range of error between 0 and roughly 330 days without reading further, whereas Month first gives a range of error of only up to 28 to 30 days depending on the month.
Shame there isn’t a 31st of April then, could make it extra wrong.
Pretty sure that iso standard of yours specifies using what you call military time, or 24 hour time system, which USA doesn’t use widely, so even they don’t use this standard
What are you even talking about?
Most countries use a 24hr clock
Many countries that use a 24hr clock don’t even use ISO8601 officially.
The only countries I know officially use ISO8601 are certain East Asian countries.
I don’t think they even use ISO8601 in the US Military.
Jokes on you, I’m too dumb to get it!
Yeah, that makes me want to celebrate my birthday more
I have a Daughter who was born on Pi day. When she was little. she would tell you it’s the second most important day, right after Christmas. Pi Day actually became a school wide fun day because of her, (small rural schools can be fun that way). We would bring a couple of pies for her math class to celebrate. Oddly, she much prefers a strawberry cheese cake for her birthday over pies.
I suspect she will NOT allow the change…
Cheesecake is pie though
Not very odd. It’s traditional to use a cake for bday instead of pie.
Fun fact: 355/113 = 3.14159…
Close enough to pi so that using it for calculating the earths circumference from its diameter is accurate to within 3 meters.… or to within π meters?
I chuckled
The engineer in me wants to tell you round it up to 3.5 just to be safe. Maybe even 4 might be better…
Better multiply it with a safety factor of 2.
I like the way you think.
You’d confuse the Americans.
Where’s the love for tau day
I was looking for you. Or someone like you. Or someone other than you.
I need a Tau advocate and you got the job.
Is this some worldly date format that I’m too American to understand?
more like a rest-of-the-worldly date format 🙃
It’s close, but the math checks out.
FUCK DD/MM FORMAT YYYY-MM-DD IS SUPERIOR
--ISO-8601 GANG
MM-DD-YY will make you cry
“In the year 3141…”
Agreed 🗣️🗣️🗣️
How about March Fourteenth as “American PI-Day” an 22.07. as “international, sensible and widely understood PI-Day”, each according to the used date format?
“widely understood” maybe in certain circles hehe
Imagine acting superior about a date format.
No need for acting when the (non-US) date format is superior
DD-MM-YYYY is better, but still causes issues. ISO 8601 though, now that’s a superior format.
Also the date format used organically in East Asia because of the cultural habit of writing big to small.
English tends small to big, so I don’t know where yanks got their date format from.
Can you elaborate on that last part? I fail to think of anything where its natural for English to go from small units to big units.
Addresses is the main one.
But also when talking about objects and categories, e.g. “the oak is a type of tree”, not “trees have a type which is oak”.
Great examples! Thanks!
22/07 is already known as “Pi Approximation Day”
A third excuse for pi, you say? I think it suits it.
Not in America it ain’t. Nobody fucking puts the day before the month.
I think America is outnumbered on that matter.
Year/Month/Day is the way.
Month/Day/Year you should fear.
Guess ya’ll just have to adapt to a better system.
Give up on imperial while you’re at it too, you’ll be happier in the long run.
Remind me again what your national day is called?
July 4th, or the 4th OF July, or just Independence Day. No one calls it 4 July.
4th OF July,
So date first, then the month?
You don’t read 1/2 as “1slash2” do you? You read it as “half”, don’t you? You don’t read 3/4 as “three four” do you? You read it as “three quarters” or “three fourths”.
Because we know how to conjugate numbers from context. Like say you finish 3. in a race. Would you read “3.” as “three” or “third”?
(It’s quite ironic how often I end up having to teach Americans English, lol.)
say you finish 3. in a race
Who would even type it that way? When talking about position, the suffix isn’t ignored, either in text or speech.
As for fractions, they are just that; fractions. Divisible portions of a whole, so different rules apply to them. They can be in the plural sense as in two halves, or 3 quarters. But you don’t have a plural dates of the month, unless you’re counting multiple years. And in that case it’s month first. Like, if you were comparing this year to other years, you wouldn’t say “this was better than the last couple 4ths of July”. You’d say, “this was better than the last couple of July 4ths”
Who would even type it that way?
You’ve never seen people use ordinal numbers?
Never seen rankings of say, hand-egg players, put down as
- Namenamename
- Namenamename
- Namenamename
?
“Ordinal” as in “by order” rather than cardinal numbers. In the middle of a a sentence you’d write “third” preferably, but you might also use “3rd”. My grammatically wrong sentence was on purpose to demonstrate that you can — or at least should be able to — read ordinal numbers.
Just like you’d read 04.06.24 as “the fourth of July, 2024”. Well, you wouldn’t, you’d read that “the sixth of April”, but only because you’re using the stupid system for dates.
“as in two halves or 3 quarters”
Why didn’t you write “three”? Were you omitting more letters because you knew I would be able to read “3” as “three”? Yes. Good. We do that for other numerals as well, and depending on the context, you add things like “of” in between them. Where’d you get the word “quarter” when I just wrote down “4”?
Thus it’s fourth of July, not “four July”.
That’s not Grammer though? That has nothing to do with how the english language works and everything to do with a nebulous idea of understanding.
It is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar
In linguistics, a grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rules, a subject that includes phonology, morphology, and syntax, together with phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics.
“everything to do with a nebulous idea of understanding.”
What do you think language is?
unless you are using ISO 8601 then i think u should…
Invalid argument as the ISO standard must include years. Not including years is just garbage
A man with an assault rifle at an island killing 77 people, many bellow 18, kinda ruined pi-approximation day in Norway.
TIL that not only is it legal to own guns in Norway, apparently you guys have a fairly high percentage of gun ownership.
Absolutely, but acquiring a weapon legally is a process involving the police and requires a sensible intent (like hunting, sports or defense against polar bears) and an approved safe storage. While there are a lot of weapons in Norway, it’s very heavily regulated.
With that said, the terror in Norway was performed with a firearm which was obtained legally with approval from the police, so the system is far from perfect.
What an oddly specific trigger. I’m sure 3/14 has a tragic past somewhere too. 🤔
From the wiki:
2019 – Cyclone Idai makes landfall near Beira, Mozambique, causing devastating floods and over 1,000 deaths.
2021 – Burmese security forces kill at least 65 civilians in the Hlaingthaya massacre.It’s recent enough that it still haunts the people of the country. It’s also not an every day occurrence like in America.