"Carl Sorenson" wrote on 2002-07-23 03:21 UTC:
> Amen to this! I will be one of the ones yelling, because new calendar
> proposals and clocks would distract from the important job of metricating
> the U.S.

I agree enthusiastically! This is the US Metric mailing list. If anyone
wants to reform calendars and civilian time notations, please set up a
calendar reform mailing list. You might find with a bit of research that
there are already several. This is in my opinion not the place to
discuss any new units of measurement or notations outside the scope of
existing ISO, IEC, BIPM, ANSI, IEEE, NIST, etc. standards and
guidelines. It takes already enough effort to get people interested in
date/time notation reforms as mild and obviously sensible as ISO 8601
(see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html).

Please let's cut down on distractions and focus on the use and
proliferation in daily life of existing international standards. The
calendar reform stuff might be intellectually very interesting, but it
is completely unrelated to the scope of this mailing list, since it
would be a new standard, not the introduction of an already widely used
existing one. [Also, none of the proposers of calendar reforms I have
seen here recently seems to be aware of the dozens of reforms proposed
over the last 300 years. They should first do their homework, find or
compile a comprehensive bibliography on the subject and read and
categorize the already existing literature on the subject.]

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

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