Mersenne.ca Status Report

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by James Heinrich

I didn't know Canada had any standards, formal or otherwise, for dates. Anything and everything goes, so you really have no idea what 06/09/12 means. It could be the same as 12/09/06, but who knows.

I found a few outlier date formats on mersenne.ca that I have now brought more inline with ISO 8601 format.

FYI, I've tried to update the mersenne.org website (and any new code I've added) to use yyyy-mm-dd wherever possible. It's an international audience and the ambiguity of other regional date formats would be too horrible to work out.

My day job involves working with a variety of int'l websites, each with their own metric or standard oddities... kind of like what you said, where it's all metric *except* XYZ which is standard for some reason.

At least we're not England where they weigh people in "stones"

Canada can use the excuse of their curious neighbor to the south and our linked economies for why certain things there are still standard measure. Personally I still get confused whenever I drive up to Vancouver and have to look at the "other dial" on my speedometer... I won't deny that I've sometimes gone 60 MPH when the speed limit was 60 KPH. Whoops.

I even once convinced a friend of mine who had never been to Canada before that once we went through the border, we would switch sides of the road and also have to do conversions to metric time. She bought it, until we actually got there...

[science_man_88]

Originally Posted by James Heinrich

Oh, most certainly. Things like railroads continuing to operate in miles is directly attributable to the USA not converting. We'd buy metric lumber too if not for the neighborly influence.

rough cut 2 by 4 is 5.08 by 10.16 cm I think but after smoothing it's closer to 3.81 by 8.89 cm

[Mark Rose]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

all metric *except* XYZ which is standard for some reason.

Metric IS standard. The system used in the US can basically be called American at this point. ;)

[snme2pm1]

Originally Posted by Mark Rose

Metric IS standard.

The wonderful thing about standards is that you can ascribe to so many.
Even "Metric" has evolved to be in many places replaced by SI, (International System of Units) or Système international d'unités as it commenced.
For example, I abhor seeing any measurement quoted as cm, which are not a preferred unit of measurement by SI, though certain places in the world still cling to it.
SI tends to favour 10^3 changes in the unit multiplier symbols.
My caliper (prior to a decimal point) has units of mm, not cm.

[Xyzzy]

https://xkcd.com/927/

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

https://xkcd.com/927/

That's pretty much the way it works. I'm reminded of "Esperanto", because, you know, we needed another language to fix everything that was wrong with every other language.

[Syntony]

Seems that the mersenne.ca data import process might have stalled again - results from yesterday (11th April) have yet to appear...

[James Heinrich]

I saw that last night but wanted to give it an extra little time to get working again by itself, but it didn't.
The problem is actually upstream on mersenne.org, yesterday's data file is mysteriously 404. I'll fire off an email to Aaron to see what's up.

[Syntony]

OK, looks like it's up and running again...

[James Heinrich]

Yeah it's running again, and it wasn't Aaron's fault.

It was basically an ugly interaction of timezones that caused some confusion.

[Mark Rose]

I'm almost to the point of setting all my clocks at home to UTC.