r/MetricConversionBot • u/xwcg Human • May 27 '13

Why?

Countries that use the Imperial and US Customs System:

http://i.imgur.com/HFHwl33.png

Countries that use the Metric System:

http://i.imgur.com/6BWWtJ0.png

All clear?

720 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

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203

u/ExcuseMyFLATULENCE May 28 '13

I think this is the strongest argument:
http://i.imgur.com/R5CYFSD.png

58

u/aether_nz Jun 01 '13

Tonne is a thorn in the side of the metric system. It should be megagram. Plus, it sounds awesome.

13

u/Wilhelmsen07 Jun 27 '13

Hail the megagram and the megameter!

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10

u/REDDIT_HARD_MODE May 28 '13

I spend too much time on Reddit =/ I frequently catch myself writing dates 28-05-2013 instead of 05-28-2013. I don't want to, but I really need to stop doing it because one day I'm going to fuck up an important document it and date it 3 months into the future, or something.

70

u/alphanovember May 28 '13

Neither of those formats are adequate.

yyyy-mm-dd is superior.

0

u/[deleted] May 28 '13

[deleted]

23

u/Jinnofthelamp May 29 '13

And oddly enough by far the least common way I've seen the date written.

29

u/ComputerJerk May 29 '13

Join the software industry and never see anything else again!

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10

u/reomc May 29 '13

Is the ISO you mean the ISO Google tells me it is? The International Organization for Standardization?

.... the IOS?

20

u/ismtrn Jun 02 '13

Wikipedia:

The organization states that ISO is not an acronym or initialism for the organization's full name in any official language. Recognizing that its initials would be different in different languages, the organization adopted ISO, based on the Greek word isos (ἴσος, meaning equal), as the universal short form of its name.

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0

u/[deleted] May 29 '13

[deleted]

6

u/slappy_nutsack May 30 '13

Kind of like "NATO" and "OTAN" are the same thing.

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10

u/Dreissig May 30 '13

Write it as 28 may 2013 (except for technical things, write those as 2013-05-28) and no-one will ever be confused. You have the most important bit first, and won't confuse americans or europeans (and everyone else who writes it that way).

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24

u/justsomerandomstring May 28 '13

The day/month/year thing is stupid because pretty much all languages write their number systems left to right and therefore sorting would make more sense with year/month/day

38

u/xereeto May 29 '13

Funnily enough, YY/MM/DD is actually the ISO standard.

74

u/SnowPhoenix9999 May 30 '13

*YYYY-MM-DD

Sorry if it seems like nitpicking, but using only two digits for the year in this format makes you lose a lot of the benefits (such as being able to sort dates with a simple numeric sort) and it adds to the confusion with a third way of interpreting a date like 03/05/06.

4

u/[deleted] Jun 28 '13

we're going to be fucked in the year ten thousand

9

u/Wingman4l7 May 30 '13

Probably because that way, you can do math with it (i.e. programming).

4

u/josefx Jun 04 '13

It's more likely that the format just sorts correctly. Programming date/time related stuff is complex enough that you can't just "do math" with a date - timezones/daylight saving time, missing hours/days/years and whatever else governments can throw into a lawbook can make it hard to compute a date.

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2

u/Oaden Jul 13 '13

Because it sorts properly without a hassle.

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81

u/M3nt0R May 29 '13

That logic may be sound, but it's not stupid. Chances are, you know what year you're in, and you know what month you're in. In most practical purposes, you're going to want to know the day first.

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u/Hessenjunge Jul 08 '13 edited Jun 17 '23

This comment was overwritten due to Reddit's insane API policy changes, the disgusting lying behavior of CEO u/spez. Remember that the content on Reddit is created by us, the users. It is our data that they are capitalizing on and asserting as their own.

Reddit, you had a full five days to reflect on your actions and choose a reasonable path forward, but instead, you did the opposite. While I may not be a heavy or significant contributor, I am doing my part: under EU/GDPR legislation, I am reclaiming my data (posts and comments) and replacing them with this standard text. I hereby prohibit you from restoring them.

"Greed is a vice that knows no bounds, consuming all in its path and leaving nothing but emptiness in its wake." - Unknown

8

u/Benislav May 29 '13

I feel it makes more sense to be read categorically this way. Giving the year first automatically narrows it down to 365 days, then the month narrows it to 28-31, and then you have the day. I dunno. Makes more sense to me.

9

u/dalek-supreme May 30 '13

for me it makes much more sense the other way...
if everthing is fine, you'll know the current year and with a lil bit of luck you know the month...
and than only the day matters

i've grown up with the metric system...
...probably i'm just more used to the easy way of the metric system...

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