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Bear in mind that you're reading a recipe written by John Locke, an English philosopher. So he's using the English definition of "pancake", which is nothing lik
by kemayo 5y ago
Bear in mind that you're reading a recipe written by John Locke, an English philosopher. So he's using the English definition of "pancake", which is nothing like the American definition.
- kragen 5y agoHe wrote it before 01694. Most of the English settlers who would define the American dialect of English hadn't moved to America yet in 01694, so there is no particular reason to expect Locke's definition to be more similar to the modern English definition than to the modern American definition. (And Nicosia claims that the result was in fact in between, even though she didn't beat it for the full 15 minutes.)
- mongol 5y agoCurious: Why do you write it 01694 and not 1694?
- kragen 5y agoProbably too much nutmeg in my diet. (No, it's a silly Long Now thing.)
- foobar1962 5y agoBeing HN my guess is avoiding the Y10K error. You're either part of the solution or part of the problem.
- JetSetWilly 5y ago> nutmeg is toxic to humans in surprisingly small amounts. I wouldn't eat half a nutmeg by myself in one sitting! It seems to be an affectation encouraged by the Long Now Foundation: https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-and-10k-compliance-at-home/ https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-di...
- mongol 5y agoI can kind of understand it if you develop a database schema. But I don't see the point for regular text. No constraints exist, you can write whatever numbers you want.
- jameshart 5y agoLong now philosophy is that writing years that way encourages you to think about history on a different scale. To consider the date now as being near the beginning of a long future of history, rather than as at the end of a long line of history. Or, when looking at a historical date like 01694 to realize it’s not so very far from 02022.
- Freak_NL 5y agoThis particular affectation seems really far from overcoming its current limitation of being a readability roadblock.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoI didn't find it particularly bad for readability. Then again, I'm used to ISO dates (2022-01-30).
- Freak_NL 5y agoIt's the leading zero that throws me off and makes me look for a day-of-month or month number in a string that is too short to have one and a leading zero. ISO 8601 dates are fine.
- mark-r 5y agoISO 8601 dates are perfect! It's too bad they're not more popular. I tried to push for them in labels used in a manufacturing plant with locations both in the U.S. and Ireland. Seems like a slam dunk because it eliminates the confusion about whether the month or day comes first. In the end I had to compromise on the month specified by abbreviation rather than number: 2022-Jan-30.