Subject: Re: [lojban] (from lojban-beginners) pi'e

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 14:15:28 EDT

In a message dated 9/14/2001 12:03:42 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Here at UCLA we have to live with and deal with the fact that a "major
> organization with quasi-governmental clout", Microsoft, refuses to make a
> standard for document interchange and stick with it. We have four mutually
> incompatible versions of Microsoft Office: 95, 97, 2000 and XP. Numerous
> other breakdowns of the standards process can be cited.
> 

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 the same 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 meeting old 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 spin and
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 are very 
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 an obscure 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't very good at 
measuring).  
And yes, if you have to communicate across cultures, it is nice to have a 
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 and even 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.