Load of bollocks
Date/time format is a human convention - so it doesn't mean a thing.
It's the 14th of March, which means only one thing to maths nerds in the good ol' US of A: Pi Day. Americans, who insist on putting the month before the day (crazy, right?) when it comes to date arrangement, celebrate the mathematical constant that frames our science and maths – 3/14. It also happens to be Albert Einstein's …
This post has been deleted by its author
Thank you so much for irritating me this Saturday.
Everyone with an IQ over 75 already knows this is the stupidest meme-that-doesn't-work ever invented; as to the remainder, can we try to convince our North American colleagues that 31st April would be a better date for this nonsense?
bc -l
bc 1.06.95
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'.
scale=100
4*a(1)
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307\
8164062862089986280348253421170676
P.
Define the mathlib with '-l' (man bc).
No, the problem there isn't that the maths library isn't loaded but the scale factor is left at default (i.e. integer). You need to set the scale register to some positive value to get that many decimal places. This is a backstop against recurring decimals and irrational numbers - since it is arbitrary precison even something as simple as 1/3 would carry on forever as it tries to calculate an exact decimal value (0.333333...) unless some limit was in place. See the very man page you reference.
"Americans, who insist on putting the month before the day (crazy, right?) when it comes to date arrangement, celebrate the mathematical constant that frames our science and maths – 3/14."
As I tweeted this morning:
Today is Pi Day. The date corresponds with Pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter* - which is now 14.315 due to inflation.
* Actually, I didn't spot until much later that I actually said "the ratio of a circle's circumference to its ratio" - D'oh!
Although there is an urban myth dating from 1998 that Alabama legislated Pi to be 3 which was based on an April fool which went viral
see http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/pi.asp
The amazing thing is that something similar did in fact happen a century earlier in Indiana where House Bill 246 was passed which define PI as 3.2
see
https://www.agecon.purdue.edu/crd/localgov/Second%20Level%20pages/indiana_pi_bill.htm
Fortunately the bill died in the senate after the vote was indefinitely postponed
http://mentalfloss.com/article/30214/new-math-time-indiana-tried-change-pi-32
http://io9.com/5880792/the-eccentric-crank-who-tried-to-legislate-the-value-of-pi
I took an engineering course where we used 3 as the value for pi.
Admittedly this was because the gearboxes on the lathes only had a limited set of speeds on offer, so there was no point at all in using more than 1 significant figure. Still 3 is not wrong for pi so long as you only want results with limited precision!
3.14152126? Or do mathematicians still use a 12 hour clock? Time and date calculations are fraught with enough complications with doing that.
Surely if we are going to be dropping centuries, removing leading zeros and swapping the locations of mm and dd then it ought be at 9:26AM
Maybe it should be 31/4/15 9:26 , ie 2031, April 15th.
"[...] format other than YYMMDD HH:MM:SS is illogical?"
The generic expression is usually? written as YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS
Unless you are using filenames that take a slash and : as delimiters in which case YYYYMMDD HHMMSS is the best form for any sorted activity.
An abbreviated YY year has led to all sorts of complications - like old people being sent their school joining instructions because they have reached 105. Since the millennium it has also been a source of confusion as to which end is the year field.
> An abbreviated YY year has led to all sorts of complications
This is a pet peeve of mine.
Database programmers (and UI designers) are forever being caught out with ambiguous date formats.
What I can't fathom is why we still insist on stupid date formats on web pages and on forms like 01/02/03 when an unambiguous form is just as straighforward and less likely to lead to mistakes, especially after the Y2K fiasco.
Only in a universe where the earth is at its centre.
I presumed that this was a tongue-in-cheek comment, but with 4 upvotes I think this kind of thing needs to be seriously debunked.
YYMMDD HH:MM:SS does not reference a unique point in time. Not unless you state a timezone and also the underlying calendar. Don't forget that with western cultures there have been calendars other than the current one. Even then, unless you are very careful, some times are not unique. For example, in areas with Daylight Saving Time, when the clocks go back, the same time can exist twice. (And that is all without bringing non-western calendars into consideration).
Pi, on the other hand, is a constant. It is constant whatever your units of measure. Ok, ok, to be as pedantic as I have been the number base (10) needs to be mentioned.