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[SealyStar]

Oh, hey, it's the "DAE Europe > America" people.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Anyway, we've already had a great date order debate here and as usual no meaningful conclusions were reached. To summarize:
D/M/Y is the most common internationally and is probably the most intuitive, M/D/Y reflects how dates are pronounced aloud by (American) English speakers, and Y/M/D is the best for collation and computing purposes (as Randall Munroe pointed out). None of them are all-around better than the others; they all have strengths and weaknesses.

[Tack]

M/D/Y reflects how dates are pronounced aloud by (American) English speakers.

We say 'Twenty first of Jan'yary' 'Fifth o' June'

[Arx]

Going to a LAN with a few of my friends tomorrow, getting my last code project for the next little while finished on Monday, and hopefully actually sleeping somewhere in there. With a little luck, I'll stop riding the mood rollercoaster.

Also, I was surprised at Machinae Supremacy's whole community/PR thing. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been, but it still made me happy.

M/D/Y reflects how dates are pronounced aloud by (American) English speakers

So basically America uses it because that's what America's always used? It's almost always pronounced as Day(th/nd/st/rd) of Month here.

[Tack]

Nobody has mentioned Oz, Lb and Gallons yet, either.

[SealyStar]

Going to a LAN with a few of my friends tomorrow, getting my last code project for the next little while finished on Monday, and hopefully actually sleeping somewhere in there. With a little luck, I'll stop riding the mood rollercoaster.

Also, I was surprised at Machinae Supremacy's whole community/PR thing. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been, but it still made me happy.

M/D/Y reflects how dates are pronounced aloud by (American) English speakers

So basically America uses it because that's what America's always used? It's almost always pronounced as Day(th/nd/st/rd) of Month here.

In America (at least, everywhere in America that I've been) people only use that order rarely for emphasis (and "Fourth of July" because that's basically a fossilized idiom). Otherwise, yes, we say February 28th, April 15th, September 11th, October 31st, December 25th...

Also, straw poll: Who actually pronounces the first "r" in "February"? I'm told some people do this but I've never heard it.

[AlleeCat]

M/D/Y reflects how dates are pronounced aloud by (American) English speakers.

We say 'Twenty first of Jan'yary' 'Fifth o' June'

Actually, I say March 21st... >_>

[Flying Dice]

The thing that bugs me most about metric is the lack of a convenient mid-range measurement of distance akin to the foot. You just skip straight from 1cm to 1m and have to run mental gymnastics to approximate distances in between. 'Close enough' is practically the motto of the Imperial system and it's wonderful.

Except when you hire lazy cheapass contractors to do your construction, then it's funny as hell for everyone who isn't you.

[GiglameshDespair]

The thing that bugs me most about metric is the lack of a convenient mid-range measurement of distance akin to the foot. You just skip straight from 1cm to 1m and have to run mental gymnastics to approximate distances in between. 'Close enough' is practically the motto of the Imperial system and it's wonderful.

Except when you hire lazy cheapass contractors to do your construction, then it's funny as hell for everyone who isn't you.

50 cm?

[miauw62]

The thing that bugs me most about metric is the lack of a convenient mid-range measurement of distance akin to the foot. You just skip straight from 1cm to 1m and have to run mental gymnastics to approximate distances in between. 'Close enough' is practically the motto of the Imperial system and it's wonderful.

Except when you hire lazy cheapass contractors to do your construction, then it's funny as hell for everyone who isn't you.

50 cm?

More like 30 cm aka "the length of a ruler".
It's really not hard :V

[SealyStar]

The thing that bugs me most about metric is the lack of a convenient mid-range measurement of distance akin to the foot. You just skip straight from 1cm to 1m and have to run mental gymnastics to approximate distances in between. 'Close enough' is practically the motto of the Imperial system and it's wonderful.

Except when you hire lazy cheapass contractors to do your construction, then it's funny as hell for everyone who isn't you.

In theory, there are other units like "decimeter" that are perfectly valid but never used for some reason. You also never see "centiliters" or "deciliters" or "hekameters" or "megagrams" (well, these are used, but they're called "[metric] ton[nes]" for some reason), even though all of these are possible and in some circumstances more practical than the common units.

That's one of the two things that bugs me most about metric. The other is that the kilogram is the base unit of mass. Why keep the prefix? Why not rename the kilogram the gram, the gram the milligram, the milligram the microgram, and so on? Why do kilograms get to be special snowflakes and pretend they're not base units?

[miauw62]

At least it's only one oddball instead of every single unit.

[Akura]

The thing that bugs me most about metric is the lack of a convenient mid-range measurement of distance akin to the foot. You just skip straight from 1cm to 1m and have to run mental gymnastics to approximate distances in between. 'Close enough' is practically the motto of the Imperial system and it's wonderful.

Except when you hire lazy cheapass contractors to do your construction, then it's funny as hell for everyone who isn't you.

50 cm?

5 decimeters?

[Urist Imiknorris]

0.5 m?

[Tack]

The other is that the kilogram is the base unit of mass. Why keep the prefix? Why not rename the kilogram the gram, the gram the milligram, the milligram the microgram, and so on? Why do kilograms get to be special snowflakes and pretend they're not base units?

Because grams matter the most to poor people, and cookbooks.

If we remade One Foot into 30 cm, that would be great, but at the end of the day they're all kind of arbitrary distances that are difficult to equate.
I learned the length of an inch and ten centimeters by literally holding my fingers up to a ruler all day until it 'felt right', then checked it over months.
It worked, until I stopped being 14 and had to learn the whole damn system all over again.

[miauw62]

Kilograms are officially the SI unit of mass.