After the French revolution, with the new metric system, it was proposed in 1793 to split a day in 10 hours of 100 minutes of 100 seconds. Much more logical, but (unfortunately/fortunately?) cancelled only 2 years later, in 1795. Some watches were built in this period. They have now a great value. Christian. -----Message d'origine----- De : Gareth McCaughan [mailto:gareth.mccaughan@pobox.com] Envoyé : mercredi 5 avril 2006 12:50 À : math-fun@mailman.xmission.com Cc : Christian Boyer Objet : Re: [math-fun] Very important moment coming up momentarily On Wednesday 05 April 2006 07:23, Christian Boyer wrote:
In fact, the only two logical orders would be: - SS:MM:HH D/M/Y - Y/M/D HH:MM:SS But never used...
The latter, very slightly modified, is the ISO standard form. It's not used very much by humans, but for computers it's excellent: clear, unambiguous, and readily sortable. The official ISO form when you have both date and time looks like this: 2006-04-05T03:02:01 . It's more readable with a space in the middle. More details than you want are at http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html -- g