times, dates, images, and S-W

["Arthur W. Protin Jr." (GC-ACCURATE) <cbmvax!uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin>]

Folks,
    (I am  a little slow in my reading and am just now responding
to things in the May issue of "ju'i lobypli".)

    On the subject of rationalizing the conventions for time and date
representations, the proposals (discussions between John Hodges & Bob)
were unimpressive, to put it mildly.  I hope you have names for the
months because I will strongly resist all those silly colons.  There
are two ways that I currently use for representing dates:
    (1) as number of day within month followed by name of month
        folowed by year as in
            06 August 90
or
    (2) as year followed by two digit number of month followed by
        two digit day of the month as in
            900806  or 19900806
The first of this is more (human) user friendly and requires no extra
punctuation or spacing: "06Aug90" can be unambiguously parsed.  The
second form is equally unambiguous, has not extranious punctuation,
and has the fine feature that it can be sorted correctly by dumb
programs.
    (I will avoid a long discussion of the nonsense of mm/dd/yy
mentioning only that it is frequently indistinguishible from dd/mm/yy
and both forms have very large followings.)
    Without a major reform of the calander, I see very little reason
to do much with the representation.  The same goes even more so for the
clocks and time representation.  The abbreviations "AM." and "PM." have
served fine in the dual role of selecting which cycle of the clock
together with identifying the context for interpreting the numbers
(the numbers preceding are hour or hour:minutes or hours:minutes:seconds).
I again have found for dealing with dumb programs that it is usually
just fine to to extend the second form of date with a dot, ".", and
a twenty four hour clock without the colons, eg.
            900806.161632576
being
    4:16:32.576 PM 08 Aug 90
Now if you want to redefine all our clocks to fill a day with 100,000
units approximately equal to 0.864 seconds ...

    As the mind heals itself by forgeting painful things so now
the memory of "image languages" fades.

    I would like to share with you all my views of how language shapes
society's thoughts (Sapir-Whorf).  Individuals, in order to think
symbolically, must have symbols with which to model the thing they
are thinking about.  Society requires individuals to internalize,
at least a certain level of proficiency, one representation scheme,
that of the society's language.  Some of us use this representation
scheme very heavily (myself included) while others have personal
representation schemes such that they must translate from their
personal thoughts into their "mother" tongue to communicate their
ideas to others (my best friend is like this).  Clearly only those
thoughts that can be represented in some scheme can ever be thought
about and only those that can be translated into a shared language
can be past on (those that can't will die with the individual).
These are the hard limits but in practice most thoughts can be
represented in most languages, (but exceptions exist like "time"
and the Hopi Indians).
    The "soft" limits are like smoking and cancer.  You can get
cancer of the lungs without smoking and you can smoke without getting
cancer,  but statistics say that smoking increases the likelihood
of getting cancer.  So it is with thought and language.  Ideas
that are easier to represent will be more likely to be thought about
and shared.  Things that are more similar in their representations
will be more likely to be involved in analogies.  Operations on
thoughts that are easier with a given representation will be more
likely to be performed than the difficult operations.
    I have seen these limits first hand!  I have had problems in
mathematics where single statements expanded to fill a page.  Working
on those problems required dedication and meticulousness because
each manipulation step involved transcribing a whole page of representation
and a single mistake ruined the whole thing.  It should be no wonder
that scientists working on complex problems in physics (relativity,
quantum mechanics, and particle physics) developed very concise
representations for both the data and the operations to be performed
on the data.  Nor should come as a surprise that discoveries in the
substance of the field seem to occur very close temporally to discoveries
in the methods of representation in the field.

    thank you all for this forum,
    Arthur Protin


Arthur Protin <protin@pica.army.mil>
These are my personal views and do not reflect those of my boss
or this installation.