If you don’t mind the inconsistency in numbering methods (when compared to yesterday), then, hey, today’s date is cool too.

December 11, 2010.

That would be 12-11-2010 or 12-11-10.

Of course, done like yesterday’s ordering, 11-12-10, it’s not as interesting.

And 10-11-12 wouldn’t make sense because I’ve not seen an example where you would put the year, the day and then the month. It’s usually the month first, then the day and then the year, which is the standard method but which itself doesn’t make too much sense.

I prefer the year first, then the month and then the day. Plus, that scheme makes it easier to sort by date, especially on the computer.

Look at it this way… Let’s say you have these dates.

December 10, 2010
December 12, 2010
December 10, 2012
December 12, 2012

Now, put those all as numbers.

12-10-2010
12-12-2010
12-10-2012
12-12-2012

Now, do a sort (on the computer) and you’ll get this:

12-10-2010
12-10-2012
12-12-2010
12-12-2012

See? Messed up. (Unless you’re sorting in something that’s date-aware.)

Now, try it with the day, month, then year.

10 December 2010
12 December 2010
10 December 2012
12 December 2012

Convert to numbers.

10-12-2010
12-12-2010
10-12-2012
12-12-2012

Now, sort that.

10-12-2010
10-12-2012
12-12-2010
12-12-2012

See? Messed up again.

Now, let’s try it the sensible way.

2010 December 10
2010 December 12
2012 December 10
2012 December 12

Now, convert to numerical.

2010-12-10
2010-12-12
2012-12-10
2012-12-12

Now, sort them.

2010-12-10
2010-12-12
2012-12-10
2012-12-12

See? They stay in order.

You put the things in ascending order of frequency of change. The year changes the most infrequently, so you put that first. Then, you put the months. The days change the most frequently so you put that last.

We do the time like that. We might say it’s quarter to five rather than four forty-five, but, in either case, we record the time as 4:45. If we add seconds, we’d record it as 4:45:15. We don’t put the minutes and then the hour, so why do we do dates backwards?

Also, I prefer the 24 hour clock, because that keeps things sorted too. Because, if you were to do a sort, you’d have AMs and PMs mixed up. Use a 24-hour clock and you don’t have that problem.

Anyway, so I guess today isn’t so interesting after all, being 2010-12-11 and all.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 11th, 2010 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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