Interesting note about using "to" for ranges. I see things like "between 15-20" or "from 15-20" all the time at work, and it's never clear whether 20 is included in that range.
Is "from 15 to 20" more clear, without context on any of these? Or is it always context dependent? How about "between 15 and 20"?
I think we can presume the reason that between usually refers the space between things, less the things. “The ATM is in the lobby between the elevators and the restaurant” probably mean the ATM in the restaurant.
The ATM is in the lobby between the elevators and the restaurant” probably mean the ATM in the restaurant.
This starts with "The ATM is in the lobby", so there's no reason to think it's in the restaurant. The "between the elevators and the restaurant" gives you a clue that if you go to the lobby and see either the elevators or the restaurant, but not both, keep going until you see the other one and once you do see the other one, you've passed where the ATM is.
This is kind of a bad example for if between means a closed or open interval, however, since neither the elevators nor the restaurant are non-occupying boundaries, but rather places that could be occupied by an ATM. However, if the ATM is found at the elevators or in the restaurant, you wouldn't describe the location of the ATM relative to both of these, you'd describe the location as at/inside one of them. You might say, though, that the ATM is at the elevators, (with the elevators being) {near,after,before} the restaurant, to explain where the elevators are.
I have tutored students who struggled severely with numbers; the most success in this task I've had with "pick a number from the list 11, 12, ..., 23".
To me "from 15-20" implies you are starting at a number between 15 and 20. Not that the entire range is 15 to 20.
And yes there is also the problem of inclusive or exclusive.
Interesting. To me, "a number from A to B" is inclusive because "from" implies belonging, making the bounds at least [A,B). The "to", to me, implies the bounds on A apply to the bounds on B. So that would make it inclusive on both edges.
You can use [15-20] inclusive and below20 above 15
for excluding? People just hate adding
"inclusive" and then complain about ambiguity when its
misinterpreted
The separate page on punctuation is interesting. They recommend against using curly apostrophes, although they do not give a rationale for this choice.
That page doesn’t follow its own advice. It recommends against contracting “you have”, but goes on to do so later in the page. Contradictions are always a bit funny on a style guide because of the imperative voice.
I legitimately don't understand how this is a controversial take. Am I just supposed to guess why it was put there? Is it normal to tell other people to open pull requests to explain why you did something? Seriously, how are they supposed to know?
It’s wild to me how prevalent and yet how poorly understood dyscalculia is. It’s around 6% in the Caucasian population, which pretty much guarantees one kid has it in every classroom. And yet, there’s very little good info on what actually works when teaching affected kids (source: my daughter has it), especially compared to the enormous well oiled machine that swings into action when a kid is diagnosed with dyslexia. I get that dyslexia is worse because you have to be able to read to learn anything, but it’s frustrating.
So under the assumption that children are randomly assigned to classrooms, 70% of 20-kid classrooms will have at least one student drawn from the 6% pool, and 30% won't. That's a "guarantee"?
Right, half is not "pretty much". Its meaning is more like "mostly", that's why it fits the above. It's something like, that situation is common enough it should be your base assumption when talking theoreticals.
For example, if you have 9 boys and 1 girl in a room, and pick one at random, you're not guaranteed to get a boy, but you're pretty much guaranteed to get a boy. It's a wishy-washy way of saying the most likely outcome by a decent margin.
The post you replied to said “they're not both girls”. That’s 75% not half.
Weirdly though, “it's pretty much guaranteed that they're not both girls” sounds unacceptable to me, but “it's pretty much guaranteed that at least one of them is a boy” sounds ok-ish, even though they’re equivalent.
“Big” and “small” shift their meaning in context in ways we are aware of, and not aware of.
Things like “almost always”, “nearly guaranteed”, “effectively never” also adjust their meaning relative to context in ways we are not aware of.
There isn’t a solution to different people having different instincts about these numbers, except being aware of the issue, and not trying to project one person’s intuitions as being the “right” intuitions.
I strongly suspect that what's going on here is not that a bunch of commenters are happy to agree with statements like "in craps, you're pretty much guaranteed not to roll 7" or "when you hit in blackjack, you're pretty much guaranteed not to get a face card".
Rather, they're making the statements they do because they feel that 17 one-in-seventeen chances must add up to one 100% chance, or because they can't tell the difference between 50% and 75%, and they don't feel like checking to see whether the things they're saying make any sense.
This is good guidance except they get the date format wrong.
(Teasing. I’ve always thought the US MM/DD/YYYY format makes absolutely no sense. Why don’t the units go small, bigger, biggest? Why do we continue to put up with that?)
How do you write the time? Do you put seconds or minutes before hours? Why not?
How do you write the year? Do you put decade before century?
How do you write numbers? Do you put the ones place before the tens?
Toddmorey asked why units don’t go from small to large and I explained that it is inconsistent with how we write numbers.
Thus, there’s no logical reason to do anything other than large to small. Anything other than ISO 8601 is preferred only for familiarity and no such inconsistent format is inherently more correct or logical.
>How do you write the time? Do you put seconds or minutes before hours? Why not?
No, because the seconds are rarely important.
>How do you write the year? Do you put decade before century?
No, because that's not how numbers work.
>How do you write numbers? Do you put the ones place before the tens?
Same answer.
>Toddmorey asked why units don’t go from small to large and I explained that it is inconsistent with how we write numbers.
Dates aren't numbers. There is a lot more context and meaning around dates that we need to consider when we verbalise and write them. But, for the purposes of e.g. data storage then absolutely - we can consider them no different from numbers. You have to understand that isn't the case with conversational English, though.
> You have to understand that isn't the case with conversational English, though.
Yes, conversational english is arbitrary. The preference there is the familiar so the listener understands. But both commonly used date formats (MM/DD/YYYY HH:MI:SS and DD/MM/YYYY HH:MI:SS) are inconsistent and arbitrary. You can’t say one makes more sense than the other because that’s just a matter of personal familiarity.
Dates should be persisted as intervals since epoch where the interval is the finest grain required. This is what enables more sophisticated tools to do sorting and change representations.
But this is a conversation about text formatting of dates. The standards for this are well established. Yes, padding is required and assumed.
> Humans think day/month or month/day, they have absolutely no interest in reading the year first.
Humans prefer what is familiar. Speaking as a human, for me that’s ISO 8601.
Oh really? I guess we’ve all been doing it wrong for centuries! Perhaps while we're at it, we should propose a new system where the months come before the days, just to keep our dates in perfect lexicographic order. Who needs tradition and worldwide acceptance, when we could have perfectly sorted dates?
> Perhaps while we're at it, we should propose a new system where the months come before the days, just to keep our dates in perfect lexicographic order.
No need. ISO 2014 was recommended in 1971 and issued in 1973.
If you have chosen any other textual representation of date and time for data interchange you are in a very literal sense doing it wrong.
We didn't need sorted dates before we started using unstructured media to store information.
Hand-written accounting journals, day books, have date ordering built into their physical substrate. It didn't matter how dates were given orally (some places: "today is the 23rd of June 1844"; others: "it's June 23, 1844 today"); nor did it matter that this ordering was transcribed onto the paper, using month numbers rather than the names of the months.
Now we do need to sort dates, so let's turn Japanese.
i invented my own which i find easier or at least more useful to read, and a requirement is it does sort properly: YYYYMMmonDD
today is 202309sep21
because i use it for filenames, i don't put in extra punctuation, there are enough cues in the format as is. To really see it, imagine scanning a list of files with different dates
it will still collate properly mixed with languages other than english
oh, you make a good point. I'm generally using it for monthly bank statements and whatnot so I'm not looking for fine grained collation, just grouping of "like with like", and i have some international accounts
Yeah, and that's great for storing things in databases. Not for everyday communication. We talk in terms of most relevant to least relevant - the day (or time) is typically most relevant, with the year being least.
My theory has always been that it's purely an artifact of the spoken language.
When we're saying a date out loud, we Americans tend to say, "September 21st, 2023," whereas I've noticed many of the Brits I've worked with have tended to say, "21st September, 2023," sometimes with an "of" after the day. Those spoken word orders were carried over into the written form, is my suspicion.
I guess that could be true. Certainly in the UK if someone asked you the date, you'd probably contract that to just saying "the 21st".
If the the month was unclear you might reply with "21st of what?" but you'd never expect an answer of just "September" to the question "What's the date?".
My assumption was it's due to an attempt to make the written date format closer to the HH:MM, and they just forgot about the years, with the spoken "Month, DayOfMonth" coming later.
Do people in the US generally say "the 4th of July" or "July, 4th" more? That might hint at an origin.
It depends on whether one is referring to the date (see you July 4th) or the holiday (Can't wait for the 4th of July). Though I do think the date version might be becoming more common than the holiday version.
As for why the month comes first, I get the feeling we Americans care about precision up to a month and less so about the numerical day such as "When does school start?" with an answer of "School starts in September". Obviously people need the precise date if you actually have a student going, but in a lot of conversation, people are just looking for the month. I can imagine that being even more true in earlier times.
We also peg things to months such as our elections being the second Tuesday of November or Labor Day being the first Monday of September. Note that in those phrases we are putting the day kind of first, but not in a particular numerical way. The month is what sticks out as a rough guesstimate of the time period.
I think if you are writing for a single-language audience (as here), then the best format is to write the month in full as they advise (6 August 2018), because it will totally avoid ambiguity.
> I think if you are writing for a single-language audience (as here)
An interesting point is that the NHS has to deal with many languages and people that don't have English as a first language. That's another reason for being very explicit.
I usually know what month it is. I often have no idea what day it is. Anchoring date format in month first gives me a warm-fuzzy that allays anxiety when I’m punched in the gut by the mysterious “day of month” detail. I usually need to know today’s date more often than I need historical ones.
None of this helps with organizing photo libraries, legal documents and video archives.
I've always disliked 100% more being twice as much. And I hate 7000% being seven times as much. Gone up 100% vs now 200% bigger.. way confusing.
"It's double"
Spurious use of % is Hard.
Fractions can be more comprehensible than decimals half as big vs 0.5 can you really be confident 0.00125 is a meaningful value applied to 2mm? Its less than 1% bigger.. approximations are useful.
I bet more people know what a right angle is than know its 90° or the equivalent in radians
Is "from 15 to 20" more clear, without context on any of these? Or is it always context dependent? How about "between 15 and 20"?