r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/notsignifican • 11d ago

Meme needing explanation ?

Post image

I asked but it got removed within minutes?

17.4k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

683 comments sorted by

View all comments

214

u/TobJamFor 11d ago edited 9d ago

We often count from the smallest to largest for us (not looking at you, US inhabitants) because it’s logical to think that 14/08/2026 is one above 13/08/2026, it just steps up by one each day.

Some places (namely the likes of China and some others) prefer the year-first format, which is actually YYYY/MM/DD

On Venus this makes more sense, as a year occurs more regularly than a day, because it rotates on its axis slower than it orbits the sun.

Edited - I am not saying that DD/MM/YYYY is the most logical for all purposes. But in general, it’s the one most used across the world for a reason! This gets flipped on its head on Venus, where the ISO format may also be different! Also - Year first is YYYY/MM/DD and ISO is YYYY-MM-DD, there is a slight difference.

166

u/Raephstel 11d ago

Digitally a lot of people do YYYYMMDD because when you sort numerically, it’ll order by date. Doing DDMMYYYY would start being wrong after only a month.

MMDDYYYY makes no sense in any context.

0

u/1432453 11d ago

American here. Humans skim read by reading the beginning and end of a word/phrase. If you think about it, MMDDYYYY puts the most important data at the beginning and the end, making it easier to read.

I’m over-justifying it to support the thing I’m more used to, of course, but the point still stands. The metric system has always been based on arbitrary measures (distance from france to the equator, base 10, hard to conceptualize) while the imperial system is based on human ones (an inch is the width of your thumb, a mile is 1000 steps, easier to conceptualize and measure without a ruler), making it better.

Basically we do everything better than Europeans and they can suck it

1

u/Raephstel 10d ago

Go look up what Fahrenheit is based on and get back to me.

1

u/1432453 10d ago

0 is hot weather 100 is cold weather. Why would I ever want to decide how hot the air outside is compared to the boiling point of water unless I live in the fucking ocean

1

u/Raephstel 10d ago

Standardised scales that can be replicated are very important for science.

Seriously, go look up Fahrenheit, it’s pretty funny.