Comments interspersed. >-----Original Message----- >From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Behalf Of Predrag Lezaic >Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2004 00:48 >To: U.S. Metric Association >Subject: [USMA:28052] Calendar, date and time > > >Hi, > >Since I came to US 10 years ago there have been 4 things that >bothered me. I >wonder if any of these almost exclusively (as far as I know) items have >anything to do with Metric vs. Imperial. > >1. Why the heck every calendar has Sunday as first day of the week? For the >religious in this group, even god rested on the seventh day, not the first!
Well, I'm not religious. The starting day of the week is arbitrary. I've always been happy with Sunday as the first day. That's also the way it was where I grew up (England). >2. AM/PM To this day I have no clue what noon is. I cringe when someone >calls 13:00, military time. I have the same problem as you with people who refer to 24-hour time as military time. However, I have difficulty believing you don't know what noon is. > >3. January 1, 2004. In Europe, it would be written 1 January, 2004. If the month is expressed as a name (or an abbreviation of a name), the date is unambiguous, so I don't care either way. I don't see much point in having rigid standards for narrative or informal expressions. However, if the month is expressed numerically, my strong preference (and my only choice) is for the ISO 8601 standard (yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss). I use it all the time -- on application forms, checks, etc. That's the way I choose to display it on my computer. >4. Letter sized paper vs. A4. Almost everyone (possibly everyone) who posts to this list prefers the ISO A Series for paper sizes. The U.S. Government was supposed to use A4 for correspondence, but nobody ever enforced it. If they did use it, paper manufacturers would have to include A Series sizes in their product lines. Thus, A4 would be widely available and others might be persuaded to switch. I have my own stock of about 6000 sheets of A4. Bill Potts, CMS Roseville, CA http://metric1.org [SI Navigator]
