In a message dated 9/14/2001 12:03:42 PM Central Daylight Time, jimc@math.ucla.edu writes:
Here at UCLA we have to live with and deal with the fact that a "major Of course, Lojban HAS a standard for dates and times and has not changed it in donkey years. It just is that every nine months or so, someone wants to come along and change it, so that we sneak up on MS in confusions. All because, according to some groups off somewhere, we have the WRONG standard. There is no such thing as a wrong standard, there are just different one for different purposes. For Lojban, it happens that the standard is dd(ww)mmccyy. For someone else, ti may be ccyymmdd and for us in the outside it is mmdd(cc)yy. they all work, convey thesame information in the same code and are easily transformable, by mere string manipulation, into one another. Why even bother to mention the issue, then? <I'm surprised that you specifically are expressing such negative views about standards, having been embroiled in the failure of JCB to pick a standard for Loglan and get it into use, and Lojban Central's decision to impose a procrustean baseline for five years. There were very good reasons to do that, of which I'm sure you're well aware, and similar considerations apply in a lot of technical areas.> I haven't complained about standards, I have complained about assuming that one peripheral standard-setting organization has the right (or any reason) to set a standard for things outside it bailiwick (if it has one, Lojban sure ain't in it). In Lojban, I'm delighted to see standards set within Lojban and tend to react negatively to people who violate them and then claim to be setting new standards (rather than just doing a bad job of meetingold ones). So far as I can see, moving to a new way to write dates is just another case writing bad Lojban -- with a rationale different from "creativity" this time. <If you're referring to units in general, you're misunderstanding their nature. Someone who has to work with these things daily quickly learns that the right procedure is to pick a basis of units, stick with it, and convert everyone else's fortnights and furlongs into the standard basis, which for worldwide data exchange is meters, kilograms, seconds, coulombs and degrees Kelvin. Wierd units such as tuns, Gunter's chains, leagues or petagrams just get in the way and need to be multiplied out at the start of the work. If you're referring to time units in particular, you're right: the spinand orbital rates for Terra are not commensurate and aren't going to be within the survival time of our species. > Well, I was talking specifically about time in that case, for there arevery few natural units in space -- all the astronomical ones are variable at best and there aren't any terrestrial ones but the diameters and circumferences of the planet, which vary all over the place as well, depending on where you measure. And, of course, at the human level, nothing works either -- hands and feet and "thumbs at the root of the nail" vary considerably. So, any unit you pick is bound to be arbitrary. But some obscure multiple of the wavelength of an obscure line in the spectrum on anobscure element! I prefer King David (of Scotland)'s thumb. Unless the point is to be arbitrary, in which case, the meter does a wonderful job (even though it started as a "natural" measure, by people who weren'tvery good at measuring). And yes, if you have to communicate across cultures, it is nice to havea single system and use it. And within a culture it is nice to have a single system and use it (I was in India while it was going through the shift from rupee-anna-pice to rupee -nayapice, and trying to make change andeven get currency accepted from one town -- even one shop in a town -- to the next was murder, especially for a gringo, who regualrly got stiffed with annas). Notice, Lojban has both systems available. And, of course, if you want world standardizations, the date is now 2452167.252. |