very interesting.... but,
on 26/8/2001 1:00 PM, Philip S Tellis at philip.tellis@iname.com wrote: Well, basically, you would want your date in the format of: year:month:date:hour:minute
For brevity, you could really omit the entire year, just put in an index starting from a reference point (say Jan 1 2000 00:00 corresponds to date zero)
I disagree with this. For whatever historic reasons, we have decided upon a zero date. If every new group comes and decides to set the zero date to one relevant to them then future historians will have a hell of a time to put everything in perspective. Does anyone know details about Julian date? I hear that system is quite good.
You encode your hours:
4==08 3==04 2==02 1==01 0==00
ummmm... 11 and 12 both can be represented by 7? why do we require the 0==00? more importantly what are you trying to do here?
anything am is +ve, anything pm is -ve (0-x) so 11am == 7, 11pm == -3 (15-4==11)
*sigh* my feeble intellect fails to grasp this too! If you are trying to convert a double digit number into a single digit number (this is only a guess !!) then how is it possible? and what is this 'x'?
Your minutes can be as is (0-59), or approximate to 50 minutes per hour (each minute is actually 1.2 minutes) and scale up to 100 minutes per hour.
ummm.. a 0-99 minutes hour will be quite decimal '-). but is it necessary? Then it would be as well to have a 0-9 hour day. I think the date representation should be in keeping with the current defined duration of the hour and the minute.
BTW anyone knows why the distribution of the day into 24 hours? and hour into 60 minutes and minute into 60 seconds? The year in one revolution of the earth around the sun (365.25approx. days) and the day into one rotation of the earth is defined quite naturally.
Final date would look something like:
2123.-412
As we use decimal system (usually) it is easy to describe 0-9 things with one digit (yes, very obvious). So if you use the Hex system you will be able to represent 0-15 things with one "digit". and so on so forth. In the above discussion the month was discarded for the week as it reduced one digit. Well we could use (deca+2) representation for month. 12 different "symbols" - maybe from the alphabet.
What is the optimum representation? dont know. but with my current "programming" 20010828:0317 seems quite verbose but OK. (at least till a better alternative is found ;)
quasi
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