Interesting Links for 16-12-2013

[andrewducker]

• The war on e-cigarettes
  (tags: nicotine europe smoking viasupergee )
• The boy whose brain could unlock autism
  (tags: autism psychology brains )
• Fox Does It Again
  (tags: SamuelLJackson FoxNews funny satire )
• I got yer underwater steampunk co-op rogue-like right here!
  (tags: games steampunk ocean )
• Grammar schools don't boost social mobility, Ofsted

Comments

[artkouros]

When I was younger and worked for the military industrial complex we were required on certain official forms to do the stupid dd-mm-yy thing (it was only yy in those days). This caused endless confusion. I began write the date like this - 16 Dec 2013. At least no one will interpret it wrong.

[rhythmaning]

Genotype v phenotype is nothing new. As Dawkins points out in that article, he wrote "the Extended Phenotype" explaining a lot of this decades ago.

I only skim-read the Aeon piece, but nothing there struck me as requiring a change in views.

American dates

[fiddlingfrog]

I'd been told in the past that the American system makes sense when you realize that conversationally they year is often the least important bit of information. That is, if I said something "happened on November 2nd" you'd assume I was talking about a day last month and not a day last decade. So in that model, the year is assumed. And November 2nd of 2013 isn't too different from November 2nd of 2009. When you do need to specify a year the month is still the most important bit, because while November 2nd and November 3rd aren't too different from each other, but September 2nd and November 2nd are.

Granted, that may be a complete BS "quickly make up something plausible" answer, but it sounded okay to me.

Re: American dates

[andrewducker]

When _saying_ it, it's obvious what you mean, because very few people say dates just as numerals.

I can cope with Dec-15-2013 if I have to, because it's unambiguous.

Re: American dates

[fiddlingfrog]

Doing a bit of quick image searching on Google it looks like a better question might be "Why did England switch from "Month dd, Year" to "dd Month Year", and why did the colonies not follow suit?

Looking back to 17th century England Oliver Cromwell used both formats in his letters. Samuel Pepys dated a letter to Newton using the month-first format (other good examples of month-first at that link). The Virginia Charter actually has both formats.

Edit: So this may be another case, like the accents, where America stayed the same and England changed.

[strangemeetings]

I had a nightmare experience with the US putting dates the wrong way round thing when I was helping with a giant bundling exercise for a case involving companies from the US, UK and others, on vacation scheme. A lot of the key events happened early in the year in question, documents had both date formats, so it was actually impossible to tell whether a lot of things were from, say, 6 April or 4 June even in context. In the end I just flagged the large number I couldn't figure out in the hope that someone more familiar with the material might have better luck figuring the correct order. Absolutely did my head in!

[skington]

Up until sometime in the early 2000s, if you wanted to find out when a .com domain expired, you had to ask the particular registrar's whois server. And while most companies implemented a sane date format, some of them used xx/xx/xxxx (or variants) which is frustratingly ambiguous - you know which way around they must be if one of the numbers is above 12, but if they're both low you have to be paranoid and assume that the lowest one is the month (because your concern is "do I have to renew this domain soon to avoid losing it?").

My comments in that code go from "OK, dates can look like this", "Hey, they can look like this as well" to "Wait, what? Why would you write a date like that?" and "Dear sweet Lord help me, some nimcumpoop has decided to show dates in this format".

[nancylebov]

I've seen a couple of complaints about the perfume in e-cigs being bad for people with perfume sensitivities, but that's just the perfume, not the e-cigs as such.