Logical Date

The Good
Are you an honest person? If you were given a time formatted hh:mm:ss and it said 23:59:59; as the next second rolled by, you know that a day just passed. Where would you logically put the field that holds the day? dd 00:00:00 would you not? Pretend, if necessary, that you have no illogical bias. Do you say cents, dollars; inches, feet; oz, lb?
If I told you my car was 1 ft. 7 inches, 4 yards long, you might then perceive it odd for having said it that way. If I then told you the length of something else, in a similar disorderly manner, you would render a harsher criticism. Now think of how you write the date and how I should think of you for not sequencing it properly.
Consider the U. S. Military/European form (now changing) of the date: dd-mm-yyyy. This is what I call a "Crazy Date." It is not even consistent within itself. For instance when the day passes from the ninth to the tenth, the one in the ten is to the left of the field previously occupied by the nine. Like the 59th second in the time, adding one produces the minutes field, to the LEFT. For reasons unknown to me, some think we should jump back to the right of the day field and place a month there. That way it can't be sorted and is very illogical, for should you wish to sort it, you must either operate on the two fields when sorting or rearrange the fields so they are in order, sort them, and illogically rearrange them back to the "Crazy Date" form again.
A "Civilian" format of the U. S. date is even more inconsistent: mm-dd,yyyy. It has the same sorting problems requiring double reformatting.
The purpose of the computer is NOT the perpetuation of insidiousness; so please don't be sequacious.
ALL dates, anywhere are data.
The most significant thing on any publication is the date, but few publishers get it right.
Don't try to protect insidious formats, leave them to the last millennium.
If you place events on web pages with illogical dates and your data is popular, think of the consequences of your actions. If you want to look at some other relationship in the data such as sorting by country, you cut and paste to a file, sort on the region, select all the data from a region you like and then want to look at it in time order. Golly, if thousands of people access your data with these needs, you've created a really inefficient use of computer time. How often have you sat waiting for "old pokey" to finish its task? Maybe you are part of the problem.
It takes money and energy to process illogical dates. Do you think we need to pollute the environment faster. If we don't do things efficiently, that certainly happens. We are talking about small, seemingly inconsequential things involving huge, consequential multiplicative factors.

                                             CHRONSENSE

      Would that I would never be,                  The dollars and the sense,
             a crier of the crime                            a system that's sublime.
the month the day, and then the year          would tens prevail throughout
               adjacent to the time.                    we would all have more of time.

        Or militarily would reckon                And this I'd hope we would grant
             the day month year                        to all the children's health
   were totally backwards to the time              and so to make their future
            in use by all, I fear.                           a little more with wealth.

Of feet and inches, I've used so much    But most for the minds of those so full
   as carpenter and machinist stealth                that they just cannot see
     go the way I hope to less avail                    the year month day time
     the sixteenths and the twelfths.                   is the way it ought to be.

                                 2000 Jun 06 03:00L Ronald W. Cook
                                    Please copy profusely.
When we determine that had we sooner adopted more efficient methods we might have been able to have avoided some calamity, may those who perpetuate the madness be justly served.
If logical dates are good for this country and you inhibit their use by perpetuating the use of insidious dates, then what are you?
What is right and my pleas are not sufficient to get the media/entertainment industry to use date formats which do not insult their audience. They are supposed to entertain, inform & help, not control? PLEASE ASK them to cease their arrogance and format dates logically. They are not only against you on this issue, but against themselves.
Think appealing to your government may help? I am not going to create a non-profit, tax free, Special Interest Group to try to buy their favors when common sense should suffice. I think they should work for the taxpayer and live off their salaries, honestly. Why not drop them a note.
The next time you pay a bill, how about throwing in a copy of this page and circle the misconfigured date that they sent you on their bill. I do, except I use an explanatory business card. You could cut and paste to make a shorter request.
There is some advantage to using a forward slash "/" to separate the fields of the date rather than a dash "-". The slash produces a path capabilty for file access. Consider Start-Settings-Control_Panel-Regional_Settings-Date then set "Short date style: yyyy-MM-dd and set "Date separator:" to / or - as you like. To make the "Long date sample:" a logical form (none offered that I see) type over it with the desired format such as: yyyy MMMM dd. Note that although dddd to get the weekday works, there is no provision that I can tell that will properly place it after the time where it belongs as ancilliary information to the more specific date specifiers.
The alternatives are sand in the bearings. Also, please think metric. What child wants to learn the constants and units of such a cumbersome system?

Please write dates logically: YYYY-MM-DD (HH:MM:SS)
or variations thereof: YYYY Mon DD, YYYY/MM/DD
Remember the MCO! Where is Moonbase 1?

Endeavour
The Good

cowaro.com
rwc at cowaro dot com

1970 by personal request, mail.
1982 bought personal computer, added by product.
1990 added e-mail. 1993 added tombstone.
1994 lecture, extended e-mail campaign.
1998 added cowaro web pages to extend "by example."
2000/09/09 17:21:43 253 Sat by Logical_date page.
2001/01/15 extended e-mail campaign to educational institutions. 2001/09 began reasoning to children. 2008/01/13 10:07:22 CST Sun 013 1200240442 Jan - last update.