Return-Path: Resent-From: cbmvax!uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin Resent-Message-Id: <9107121842.AA05939@relay1.UU.NET> Date: Mon, 6 Aug 90 16:59:59 EDT From: "Arthur W. Protin Jr." (GC-ACCURATE) To: lojban-list@snark.thyrsus.com Cc: protin@PICA.ARMY.MIL Subject: times, dates, images, and S-W Message-Id: <9008061659.aa08340@COR4.PICA.ARMY.MIL> Resent-Date: Fri, 12 Jul 91 14:36:43 EDT Resent-To: John Cowan Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Fri Jul 12 17:35:05 1991 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin Folks, (I am a little slow in my reading and am just now responding to things in the May issue of "ju'i lobypli".) On the subject of rationalizing the conventions for time and date representations, the proposals (discussions between John Hodges & Bob) were unimpressive, to put it mildly. I hope you have names for the months because I will strongly resist all those silly colons. There are two ways that I currently use for representing dates: (1) as number of day within month followed by name of month folowed by year as in 06 August 90 or (2) as year followed by two digit number of month followed by two digit day of the month as in 900806 or 19900806 The first of this is more (human) user friendly and requires no extra punctuation or spacing: "06Aug90" can be unambiguously parsed. The second form is equally unambiguous, has not extranious punctuation, and has the fine feature that it can be sorted correctly by dumb programs. (I will avoid a long discussion of the nonsense of mm/dd/yy mentioning only that it is frequently indistinguishible from dd/mm/yy and both forms have very large followings.) Without a major reform of the calander, I see very little reason to do much with the representation. The same goes even more so for the clocks and time representation. The abbreviations "AM." and "PM." have served fine in the dual role of selecting which cycle of the clock together with identifying the context for interpreting the numbers (the numbers preceding are hour or hour:minutes or hours:minutes:seconds). I again have found for dealing with dumb programs that it is usually just fine to to extend the second form of date with a dot, ".", and a twenty four hour clock without the colons, eg. 900806.161632576 being 4:16:32.576 PM 08 Aug 90 Now if you want to redefine all our clocks to fill a day with 100,000 units approximately equal to 0.864 seconds ... As the mind heals itself by forgeting painful things so now the memory of "image languages" fades. I would like to share with you all my views of how language shapes society's thoughts (Sapir-Whorf). Individuals, in order to think symbolically, must have symbols with which to model the thing they are thinking about. Society requires individuals to internalize, at least a certain level of proficiency, one representation scheme, that of the society's language. Some of us use this representation scheme very heavily (myself included) while others have personal representation schemes such that they must translate from their personal thoughts into their "mother" tongue to communicate their ideas to others (my best friend is like this). Clearly only those thoughts that can be represented in some scheme can ever be thought about and only those that can be translated into a shared language can be past on (those that can't will die with the individual). These are the hard limits but in practice most thoughts can be represented in most languages, (but exceptions exist like "time" and the Hopi Indians). The "soft" limits are like smoking and cancer. You can get cancer of the lungs without smoking and you can smoke without getting cancer, but statistics say that smoking increases the likelihood of getting cancer. So it is with thought and language. Ideas that are easier to represent will be more likely to be thought about and shared. Things that are more similar in their representations will be more likely to be involved in analogies. Operations on thoughts that are easier with a given representation will be more likely to be performed than the difficult operations. I have seen these limits first hand! I have had problems in mathematics where single statements expanded to fill a page. Working on those problems required dedication and meticulousness because each manipulation step involved transcribing a whole page of representation and a single mistake ruined the whole thing. It should be no wonder that scientists working on complex problems in physics (relativity, quantum mechanics, and particle physics) developed very concise representations for both the data and the operations to be performed on the data. Nor should come as a surprise that discoveries in the substance of the field seem to occur very close temporally to discoveries in the methods of representation in the field. thank you all for this forum, Arthur Protin Arthur Protin These are my personal views and do not reflect those of my boss or this installation.