Dates?

[AngelofDeath]

A question in suggestions has got be wondering.

In Britain we display the date as day/month/year, but the Americans display it as month/day/year.

Why are there two different ways and do other countries use other ways of displaying it?

[Tim Baxter]

It's just stupid convention, it makes more sense to me to list day/month/year because small/larger/largest item seems logical.  Very soon the whole world will use the Yank convention because good old Bill Gates will dominate.  It doesn't help when we adopt Americanisms like Billion (meaning 10 to the 9th instead of 10 to the 12th power) or Steve Wright (who?) insists on saying 'June three, two thousand five' just like the yanks do.  Or even that we changed the millenium a year early when it should have been at midnight, Dec 31st, 2000.

[Quizmonster]

Something appears to have happened to British usage regarding dates around the end of the Victorian era. Most letters, for example, from the 18th/19th centuries have dates such as 'January 12th, 1850' (Elizabeth Gaskell) or 'December 8, 1884' (RL Stevenson). That is, the month is given first and the date follows.
From the early 1900s, however, it is more common to find dates such as '15 August 1904' (James Joyce) and '9 January 1944' (George Orwell)...date first followed by month.
It's clear, therefore, that present-day Americans use the system we in Britain used to employ, so - if anybody has changed - it's us not them!

[jake-the-peg]

I don't think you'll find us adopting American date format too soon, because as you say it's more logical and therefore better programatically to use the European format.

However the American Billion is more sensible because it fits in with the SI unit convention of having a new prefix for every multiple of a thousand

nano, micro, milli, Kilo, Mega, Giga etc.

and six hundred and fourty seven thousand million seems such a mouthfull!

[Loosehead]

The correct term for 10 to the 9 is a Milliard, 647 milliard sounds much better!

[Jay70]

10 exp 9 is a Giga which is one thousand million a US Billion.

10 exp 12 is a Tera which is one million million a European Billion.

[Didwot]

The american system of writting dates more closely reflects the usual way we speak about them eg January 1st, rather than 1st of January. but it does give a disconceritng move from back and forth across the scales of time when read.
There is an international standard which is yyyy/mm/dd, which no one uses in every day life, but does enable you to simply tack on the time to get a rational expression of when something happened yyyy/mm/dd/hh/mm/ss. Neat but cumbersome.
At the risk of boring you what time is it on Mars? Answer> Astronomers use Universal Time which means that it is the same time everywhere, and conveniently Universal Time is the same as Greenwich Mean Time.

[Ouisch]

Tim seems to have a wee bit of a chip on his shoulder about Americanisms.  I don't know if our month, day, year format will take over the world any time soon...when filling out forms online, it seems like the day, month, year format is still the norm.

[Tim Baxter]

UTC is not quite (micro-seconds in it) the same as GMT.

I don't have a chip on my shoulder with the Yanks as such, I'm worried about any detrimental, external influence on our society.  But, I do admit that their use of Aluminum is correct.  I think it was our Humphrey Davey who changed our spelling to Aluminium (just so's all metals might end with ium.)

[Cristo]

So Didwot, I can travel to mars and not have to reset my watch, but to the USA i have to .   Mars = zero jet lag.  Cool, mars it is then,  where's the brochure.......

[stevie21]

This is so much of a change of subject that it's almost irrelevant but if you ask your PC to organise lots of files or folders by name then the only way that they appear in chronological order is as follows:
yyyy-mm-dd

As much as it pains me to, I have folder named in this fashion on my PC.

[Tim Baxter]

Ah Cristo, don't forget that if you travel to mars you will be travelling at speeds which are nearer the speed of light than normal, thus, for you, time and your watch will slow down.  When you decelerate and land on Mars you will have to reset your time to UTC. but possibly not as much as the difference between here and the States.

Wikipedia tells us that 'Milliard' is only used now in other European languages, UK & US having adopted  Billion, shame!

yymmddhhmm is used by comm's personnel to date stamp their messages but usually only the ddhhmm if comms logs are kept.

So, who sets up the date/time format in which folders and contents are arranged?  Good old Bill Gates!

[honkytonkman]

Ouisch, interesting to see you use the American 'filling out a form' rather than the British 'filling in a form'... hmmmmmm :)