Life In 19x19

Thank-you trout : )

11/4,11/6,11/7/13 - Semi final(3 games match)
Pairing for semi final;

Lee Sedol vs Wu Guangya
Tang Weixing vs Shi Yue



12/10,12/11,12/12/13 - Final

Thanks for the dates.

I'll always wonder how month/day/year could become a standard though.

Knotwilg wrote:I'll always wonder how month/day/year could become a standard though.

Because it's not actually a standard?
According to this wikipedia article, most countries seem to adopt the infinitely more sane day/month/year format, after that comes the reverse but still logical year/month/day format, and trailing far behind comes the esoteric month/day/year format.

This is somewhat reminiscent of the US not using the metric system, or teaching religious "alternatives" to evolution in public schools, or having a significant percentage of climate change denialists in the general population.

These are things unheard of in most other parts of the "civilized world".


edit: typos

On 2013 October 12th I was reminded that the typical programmer attitude towards dates is extremely myopic because we need to distinguish all of the following:

1. Expressing dates in ordinary speech or most forms of writing intended for humans to read
2. Writing times that are only going to be read by people who share a background that makes them expect the same format
3. Writing times in a context where readers of unknown backrounds might encounter them
4. Writing textual times with the expectation that they're going to be parsed by machines, either because they're somehow structured data (XML, HTML, etc), or because you're expecting natural language processing to happen
5. Storing time based data for future access.

ISO-8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) is only relevant to 4, and maybe 5 (I don't think it's relevant to 5, but maybe I'm missing something).

If you don't know your audience's background, they'll probably figure out ISO-8601, but you still probably shouldn't use it, because it's less obvious than October 12, 2013.* It also degrades poorly, since some dates don't need a year.

Obviously, if you know that all your users share a common background, you'll write dates in the way they find most comfortable.

For ordinary verbal and written dates, you just say "October 12th" in (American?) English, or "le 12 Octobre" in French. If you think that actual French and English people walking around are saying dates wrong, you are high as a kite. Aside from the real issue that you probably can't get people to change how they talk, I'll repeat my earlier point: most dates that are spoken, texted or emailed do not require a year.

One day, I'll really have to write this up more formally.

* (or 12 October, 2013--looks strange to me, even after signing my checks that way for a few years, but it might float your boat, and I won't be put out)

Edit: I realize that this only applies when you know that your readers can speak English. There's a good case for ISO-8601 for things like expiration dates, where it's important that dates be recognizable without linguistic competence.

@hyperpage:
You talking to me? You talking to me?
Well I'm the only one here. Who the f*@! do you think you're talking to?

scnr. But seriously, if my post wasn't the only one you could possibly be addressing I wouldn't have guessed you were talking to me.

I'm also not really sure what point you're making. The wikipedia page I linked to is mostly referring to the digit-only date formats, which is also the format of the dates that appeared in this very thread.


Obviously there's no possible way anyone would understand only one of "9th October" or "October 9th", the order is completely irrelevant if you indicate the month in its written form.
It's when you abbreviate it as 10/9 or 9/10 that the trouble starts and you need to define the order.

And you can try to defend idiosyncrasies all day, it won't make them any better. The order month/day/year is unnecessarily counterintuitive, as is the imperial system.

Ok, in utterly simplified terms:

You should not use simple MM/DD or DD/MM unless you know your audience has a precise expectation that you'll use one of them.

You should also not use YYYY/MM/DD unless you need it to be parsed by a machine.

You should generally write 12 October 2013, or October 12th, 2013, (or 12 Oct 2013, or...many minor variations) and can omit the year if it's not needed.

You should not go on silly rants about how everyone needs to use YYYY/MM/DD.

You should also not post incoherent angry responses with swearing to things. But that wasn't part of my original post.

hyperpage wrote:You should not go on silly rants about how everyone needs to use YYYY/MM/DD.

I didn't? Anywhere? Ever? I'm also not saying that anyone needs to teach evolution (as opposed to creationism, for example) in their classrooms, or that everyone needs to drop the imperial system for units of measurement.

hyperpage wrote:You should also not post incoherent angry responses with swearing to things.

How did you get the idea I was angry? You are aware I was quoting a popular American movie?
And I felt my argument (which you didn't address at all, btw) was pretty coherent.

It went like this:
day < month < year = happy :D
year > month > day = happy :D
month > day < year = sad :(

hyperpage wrote:You should not use simple MM/DD or DD/MM unless you know your audience has a precise expectation that you'll use one of them.

I would tend to agree. What does that have to do with anything I have said, though?

Anyway, we should really stop derailing this otherwise useful thread.

Well, it seems that we've both been misunderstanding each other. My apologies for that.

Somewhat back on topic, I haven't really seen anything about Tang Weixing before this tournament, and his Sensei's page is pretty sparse. If he wins this next set he'll be in the finals, given that he's 3d now does that imply any sort of promotion?

any live stream for this?

Wbaduk will have it I think. To bad it starts at 1 am my time

I heard KBS is broadcasting. Anyone know how to watch from outside Korea?

Due to live broadcasting on TV, game started 9:40am Korea time.
So it will be 7:40 US eastern time.
You can watch relay of this game at Oro or Tygem.