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The American date format of MM/DD/YYYY is simply idiotic, as is our ridiculous clinging to Imperial measurements, when the metric system makes so much more sense. Why? I believe we Americans are just too lazy to adapt to a new system, despite the fact that it just makes sense to do so!
OK, I have my coat and am long gone! 
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
modified 23-Jul-15 7:14am.
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How does the metric system make more sense? It's no less arbitrary and the assumption that people will find the arithmetic less difficult is highly doubtful (shortly after we decimalised currency in the UK I was delayed by several minutes in a shop because the assistant needed to fetch a calculator to work out a 10% discount!) The imperial weights fit particularly well with the quantities of things that people might want to buy - I know exactly what I'm getting in a quarter of mushrooms, an ounce of yeast or a pound of mince and so that's what I continue to ask for despite the EU's attempts to homogenise us all with baffling amounts. Long live the pound, the pint and the mile, I say.
And to return the date. It is of course the departure from the Imperial norm made by Americans (when and why I have yet to discover) that causes all the problems. Who else could come up with a system that takes a unit from its rightful place in between the lower and the higher and sticks it at the front? You don't do mm:hh:ss so why MM:dd:yy Bewildering!
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I believe the US Navy uses dd/MM/yyyy. Of course, the correct usage should be yyyyMMdd. No ambiguity there at all.
Long live Imperial! 
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True, and year should be yyyy, not yy only.
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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Neither imperial nor metrics system makes sense. Check the very basic physics for this 
modified 19-Jan-21 21:04pm.
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0x01AA wrote: Check the very basic physics for this
Yup. We should measure speeds in fractions of the speed of light, time as a multiple of a basic physical frequency, and distance at the distance travelled by light in a time unit.
Come to think of it, that's how the meter and second are defined!
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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I lived through the transition from the imperial system to the metric system in South Africa so I do have some experience in both systems. As far as I am concerned there is no choice: Metric is head and shoulders better than imperial!
I also experienced the transition of the monetary system from pounds/shillings/pence to the current metric equivalent in SA and the UK. In SA the transition was overnight. Pounds were withdrawn from circulation in a matter of days. In the UK it took months as they chose to run a dual system for months. Very painful!
Nobody will ever convince me that imperial is better!
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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Cornelius Henning wrote: I lived through the transition from the imperial system to the metric system in South Africa so I do have some experience in both systems. As far as I am concerned there is no choice: Metric is head and shoulders better than imperial!
I likewise lived through the transition in Canada, and agree that metric is better than Imperial or US.
One exception though: the country was surveyed in chains, yards, feet and inches, and changing "travelling" distances to metric was a bad idea. Anything that was in round numbers when surveyed, bought or sold is now in fractional units (meters, hectares, ...) and this is nothing less than a mess.
I'm retired. There's a nap for that...
- Harvey
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In the UK, pounds were not withdrawn. A pre-decimal pound and a post-decimal pound were the same. Only the sub units were changed from good mini radix numbers or 20 and 12 to very poor calculation number 100. Even now, the UK is consistent - a pound is a measure of money and a measure of weight. What could be simpler than using the same unit name for multiple types of unit?
But, you could buy a lot more with a pre-decimal £1 than you can buy now.
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I think the reason it was done is plain - Americans (and some others) tend to say
When speaking it is rare to include the Year
It is sensible to speak the largest part first
So - June 5th narrows down the target as it is spoken - ideal!
So Yanks take that as 6/5
Then slam the date on the wrong end because it seems less important to them.
Idiotic - but then so is belief that the constitution means you can own an arsenal many a small country would be proud to own...
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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But .. but ... when you ask someone the date they usually just give you the day, assuming that you're not so divorced from temporal reality that you can't pinpoint the month for yourself. And in formal situations such as a legal document you'd have to say 'this third day of September in the year of our Lord 1784' because 'September, this third day of' etc. just doesn't make sense. And surely it's legal usage that sets the template for such things not the informal?
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"When is you birthday?" : "July 4th."
"When Mark's party? "November 12th"
Month-Day answers to questions in everyday conversation.
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Member 9082365 wrote: And surely it's legal usage that sets the template for such things not the informal?
I don't think so! I think this is an example of evolution in the same way that changing spellings and pronunciations are. Nobody sat down and thought "Hmm -= what format should we use for dates?"
If they had we'd have been using a decimal calendar !
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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Well obviously somebody did sit down and think what format should the USA use for dates at some point or there wouldn't be agreement on the standard form used in business etc. (especially so as the format is different to the one that European settlers would have brought with them). It may be lost to us now but somewhere at some time there was a declaration made enshrining the 'new' format.
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I don't think so I think it's a 'defacto' standard.
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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Member 9082365 wrote: Bewildering!
Yeah, damn foreigners.
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Look at SI Units: the metric system makes more sense simply because things equate to one another properly, and everything matches up. Imperial units just don't work that way: when you're trying to do anything with mechanical engineering involving equations, the calculations fail because the results are numbers which don't match the measurements they're supposed to be expressed in.
When American engineers want to build complex systems, they have to measure everything in imperial units, convert to SI units, do the work, then convert everything back to imperial units again in order to build whatever it is they're going to build. I choose to believe that this is why American car engines need four litres of displacement to produce less power than European or Japanese engines half the size can generate.
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I find it very difficult to believe that that's what any engineer does in reality but then this is the weirdest pro point I've ever come across. The equations that were created using SI units don't work with Imperial measurements? Gee, how did they ever do science before SI units then. Oh ... right ... they used equations that were created using Imperial units. The fundamental physical relationships don't change because you change the units that you measure values in, and in most cases there isn't even any need to modify the equation; s = d/t and F = ma whether you measure in metres, feet or cubits, kilograms, pounds or (idealised) chihuahuas!
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Wrong. There's a concept of coherence in systems of measurement: as described here[^].
Before this, doing science was significantly harder. The imperial system is NOT a coherent system of measurement, and thus calculations don't work. So, as I said before, you have to convert everything into SI units, do the calculation and then convert it all back again afterwards, otherwise you're forever trying to figure out how many of each unit of whatever measurement you started with end up figuring into whatever units you want to end up with.
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No. The arithmetic was more difficult. The science was completely unaffected. Almost all the significant engineering formulae were discovered before the metric system was even a glint in someone's eye and more than a few even predate the Imperial system. Ultimately the mathematics of science is always shoehorned into the measurement system of the day which is always arbitrary. There is no such thing as a coherent measurement system whatever way you cut it. There is no more logic to making your measuring stick the length of a fraction of the Earth's circumference (which in itself is an idealised length) than the average length of a male adult's foot. Simply because you have a name for a derived unit such as the newton doesn't change the fact that it is a derived (and arbitrary!) unit. There is no more coherence to the concept it disguises, it is a measure of mass multiplied by acceleration. 1N = 1m/s^2 is no more nor less consistent and coherent than 1 Tortoise Pull = 0.0013 dog tails per eyeblink ^2. The only difference is the speed of calculation (measured in camel heartbeats, obviously)!
Anyone who thinks that SI units are any less arbitrary than any other measuring sytem or fit more closely the natural spans of the Universe and the laws of physics they clearly haven't taken a look at the definition of those units recently (the second is a doozie!). The SI system is a convenience for scientists. It no more reflects the real world and how it's put together than the scribblings of a madman!
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I think you've just made my point for me with the phrases "the arithmetic was more difficult" and "The SI system is a convenience for scientists." Look at how SI units interlock, and how you can perform one calculation after another, from unit to unit, and it all maintains coherence. The Imperial system can't do that.
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Yes, it can, and did so very successfully for centuries. It would simply need updating with a few additional units to cope perfectly adequately with modern scientific calculations. There are, indeed, many international conventions which still use Imperial such as feet for aircraft heights, knots for boat speeds, and fathoms for water depth. I certainly don't expect the death of horsepower any time soon. And as someone else pointed out backing the metric system has proved to be a complete misstep with the arrival of computers as base 10 is the absolute worst for computer calculations with just two factors (2 and 5) making it all but impossible to express part units accurately in binary code. In the digital age decimal units are the dinosaurs.
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Don't know what type of engineering you are referring to but I work in Structural Engineering in the US and nothing gets converted to SI and back. That said, I would much prefer using the metric system.
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This would be mechanical engineering for things like cars, planes, etc. If you start doing fuel/mass/acceleration/... calculations, you'll be wanting SI units for sure.
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Why do Americans call it the 'Fourth of July' and write 07/04/2015?
So much simpler if we all used the ISO 2015-07-04.
I work with financial data that often can't be directly copied and pasted from web sites and PDF documents into other programs. I thought that was going to be fixed in the Windows 3.1 upgrade.
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