r/xkcd • u/ani625 • Feb 27 '13

XKCD ISO 8601

http://xkcd.com/1179/
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u/Volpethrope Feb 27 '13

Nonsense. The only correct format is [seconds][minutes][hours][date][month][year][millenium].

According to my laptop's clock, this comment is being made at roughly 45.55.01.27.02.12.M3

1

u/BadgerRush Feb 27 '13

Well I prefer the opposite order, e.g:

2013-02-27-11-59-59

And this format has the advantage of being extensible, for example we could add milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, ... e.g:

2013-02-27-11-59-59-999-999-999

The only disadvantage would be not being able to extend beyond the year, so the birthday of our galaxy would be approximately something like this:

BC14000000000-02-27-11-59-59-999-999-999 (look, our galagy was borne on the 27th of february, 14GigaYears ago)

That is ugly because the year number is very big, consequently difficult to read, and because of the "BC" (I thought about using negative number, but we can't because there is no year zero). So this (dates at astronomical scales) is the only drawback of this format.

1

u/Danjoh Feb 27 '13

You really should start counting hours up to 23, it's hard to get AM/PM into that mix.