540 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/5/16 A Fine and Pixeled Place”

1. @Meredith

   I’m fine with it in context too, and as Mike is already using M/D in scroll titles I’m used to it here.

   ISO Standard 770 is for “Crude or rectified oils of Eucalyptus globulus” whereas it clearly should be for the correct number of pixels in a scroll.

2. Kip W:
   Avatar: Whatta they got that I ain’t got?
   Terminator and Star Wars (in unison): Sequels!

   Oh guh, that’s right. Those things will be out for the next three Christmases in a row. Maybe they’ll be better than the first, though.

3. @Mark,

   I’d note that the order of month&day is actually the same in ISO-8601 as in the US format – it’s just that the year is placed first, rather than last; so the month/day part remains exactly same as it always has in either case.

4. The only time I dislike the US date system is in Google Sheets, because it doesn’t seem to like consistently recognising the correct (eg European) date format at all.

   Other than that, I’m so used to searching by month/day here that any changes would ruin this site for me. Ruin.

   Anyway, surprisingly good article from Green, and very amusing to see McCarthy put Beale’s nose out of joint.

   Gotta say, back when I was a poor student I bought my CDs second hand but my books new. Now that I’m older I seem to buy my music new but my books second hand – although this is in part down to circumstance. I currently live in a city in Thailand with some excellent used book stores, with usually a much greater range of books in English than at any of the new book stores. Plus I relented years ago with regard to my physical music collection and ripped 99% of my physical CDs to my computer and started just downloading mp3s after that to free up space. For books.

   Oh and on the subject of Avatar: It doesn’t have a pop culture following because it’s kinda… well… super dull. Great CG and 3D and all that, but those are just gimmicks. Films still need to be entertaining and/or interesting to actually watch them. I’m sure Lucas found out that gimmicky effects weren’t all they were cracked up to be when he set about destroying fiddling around with the original Star Wars films.

5. The US format is unambiguously wrong. Seriously, medium>small>large?
   But the European format will also confuse people who misread it as a US format.
   A simple solution is to spell out the month. Jan 5 2016 and 5 Jan 2016 are both equally comprehensible.
   (or use the ISO format, but I know people sometimes feel it is too formal)

6. The US format is unambiguously wrong.

   It is in the same order that most people use when they write out a date in English: January 6, 2016 becomes 1/6/16. It is a straight translation of normal usage.

7. [ticky]

8. I avoid confusion by calling it 17 Nivôse CCXXIV.

9. @Anna Feruglio Dal Dan:

   Very true. And yet my inner OCD demon screams every time I see a US format date. (BTW, since in my job I often deal with time series in Excel, encountering a US format column causes shivers of horror to go down my spine*.)

   Interesting! I work with time series in Excel or BI tools all day, and to me, either ISO or USA-style work*, but Euro common style (d/m/y), doesn’t at all. For numbers anyway: when month names are used, e.g. 5-Jan, it’s easier to take in. If I’m looking at a within-year weekly time series, e.g. d/m/y buries the “centering information” – what month am I in? – in the middle in a way that makes it hard to follow. Even d/m without the year on the end kind of delays the important info.

   However, I’m sure that people who are used to looking at d/m/y every day have learned to zoom in on that middle term without noticing the extra effort. There is a logic to the USA style of date writing. It’s not beyond argument, but it’s not baseless either.

10. It is in the same order that most people use when they write out a date in English

    eh, not really. That is a common way to write the date, sure, but it is equally common to say 6th of January, 2016. At least on this side of the pond.
    And either is fine, as long as you are saying January, or writing Jan. 6/1 and 1/6 only work if you know which date format is being used.

11. Here it is 16 Nivose 2016, meaning somewhere around 4006 in your old christian calendar.

    France finally succeeded in taking over the world with Napoleon CXLVII succesful landing in New Jersey aboard 5 miles-long steam-powered dreadnoughts.

    As a main consequence, we finally could force the bloody metric system on the USA so the dreadnoughts are in fact 8.04672 km long.

12. @Aaron,

    It is in the same order that most people use when they write out a date in English: January 6, 2016 becomes 1/6/16. It is a straight translation of normal usage.

    Again, this is a regional, American thing, not a universal one. In the UK, people tend to write “6 January 2016” or similar; see for instance this explanation.

    Spelling out the month as a word does disambiguate things, but to make things easily searchable, ISO-8601 is both unambiguous, standard, and also leads to dates being lexicographically sortable, which is another nice property.

    Best wishes,

    // Christian

13. Out of curiosity, do the different date formats carry over into spoken language? If asked the date, I’m more likely to say “January 6th” than “the sixth of January,” so my spoken language matches the USA date format that I write. Do people who write day/month/year also use parallel constructions when they speak?

14. There’s an excellent case to be made for ISO format, but “Americans are unambiguously wrong” ain’t it.

15. @Nickp: I’m English and say [day] of [month]. This may or may not be true for any other Brits hanging around.

16. @rea

    While in these degenerate times of loose language and looser morals one might simply refer to a resident of Hamburg by such a crass diminutive I assure you in the more civilized age of Vicki 1 (God save the Queen!) such things simply weren’t done outside Walla Walla.

17. (2) BIG BUCKS BUT SMALL FOOTPRINT
    It may just be my poor memory, but I don’t think Avatar made much of a footprint even when it was on. I don’t remember much in terms of posters, teasers, trailers and merchandise.

    There was a memorably clumsy plug for Avatar on Bones.

18. Do people who write day/month/year also use parallel constructions when they speak?

    if you asked me the date I’d say it’s the 6th of January, not January 6th. You already know it’s January! Unless you just stepped out of a time-machine, in which case ISO standard is preferred. It would certainly save Doctor Who a lot of time.

19. Correct usage in England is to say 6th of January 2016, yep. Best not to assume that USA formatting is universal.

    As I said, I don’t like the USA date thingy but since USA culture is sprayed all over everything it isn’t as if most of us will have a problem reading it. We have practice.

    Not SF, but I’ve been watching Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries and it’s an awful lot of fun. Great costumes, witty dialogue, appealing characters, surprisingly deep. Would prefer if they didn’t try to occasionally put the light-hearted end scenes right after the tragic consequences of actions scenes because I am not prepared for witty banter while I am still sobbing over tragic jazz. Ahem.

20. @Nickp:

    Yes. In the UK, “6th (of) January 2016” would be a common way of expressing today’s date.

    Interestingly, in Sweden, where ISO-8601 has been in wide use for a long time, people do sometimes speak in ISO-8601 (“tjugohundrasexton noll-ett noll-sex”) though mainly when wanting to be completely clear and unambiguous or official; colloquially “sjätte i förste tjugohundrasexton” eller “sjätte januari sexton” would probably be more common. Swedes also use week numbers quite frequently (“Vi kan ta en tur till Barcelona runt vecka sjutton”).

21. It’s Day / Month / Year, as the good lord intended.
    If you want to muck about with that, fine, be a barbarian.

22. “Americans are unambiguously wrong” ain’t it.

    In fairness, I didn’t say Americans were unambiguously wrong. Just that they use the wrong date format. And measurement system. And the wrong words for things. And what do they have against the letter ‘u’? I thought it was one of their three favourites.

    I may not be entirely serious about all of this.

    Or I might be hiding my deeply-felt opinions beneath a flippant veneer.

23. When I use dates for file names, I put the year first then month and then day. (Sorts better for most purposes.) I demand we all do things my way!

24. First of January is right. January the First is right.

    Excel… I remember that in older versions they used the Third of April as their example date in showing how DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY might format your data. At least I think it was. Could have been the Fourth of March.

25. @NIckp

    Interesting question. I think I’m most likely to say the “5th of January”, but if speaking of a date in the future where the month is most important, I might start with that – “October the 15th”. I would never write “October 15th 2016” though – it would be 15th October 2016.
    Incidentally, the next wrinkle is whether you use “th” or not. My workplace has a letter writing standard of “15 October 2016” which I rebelliously always attach “th” to. We then do electronic filing in strict ISO, but various computer systems we use have validations that insist on either 15-Oct-2016, 15/10/2016, 15-10-16 depending on which you’re in, and don’t have messages to tell you what’s wrong.

26. To expand upon the date flaming, this picture says it all:

    http://weknowmemes.com/2012/02/united-states-vs-the-rest-of-the-world-measurements-systems/

27. January the First. The First of January. Both forms are perfectly cromulent.

28. Re: Avatar, the thing that really stood out for me when I watched it was that Cameron felt like the first (only?) director to actually think about how to frame shots and move the camera in a true 3D environment, as opposed to filming a standard 2D film and occasionally jabbing things at the screen.

    The visuals were gorgeous, and it did have a couple of genuine moments (when the protagonist, whose name escapes me, wakes up in his Na’vi body for the first time and goes running for the sheer joy of it, for example); too bad the story and characters just weren’t generally all that memorable.

29. Mark-Kitteh:

    Dammit, I had “date format flame war” in the sweep for February. For January I’ve got “two people argue over who had the username first” and I’m still waiting for a competing Mark so I can deliberately start that one.

    Since you’re already Mark-Kitteh, you lost that one before it even started.

    Anna:

    (BTW, since in my job I often deal with time series in Excel, encountering a US format column causes shivers of horror to go down my spine*.)

    Excel’s handling of date formatting causes shivers of horror to go down my spine without introducing US format. Seriously.

30. @ Meredith
    “I’ve been watching Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries and it’s an awful lot of fun.”

    It is, but the books are miles better. I write this as one who never thought to be interested in a 20’s flapper in Australia – but is. I now own the whole series.

31. @msb

    I picked up the first one in a sale awhile back but I hadn’t got around to reading it yet. Good to know that when I do I ought to enjoy it. 🙂

32. @rae:

    You’re right to be skeptical. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “Hamburger” appeared in English-language documents in the sense of “native or inhabitant of Hamburg” at least as early as 1617.

    The Walla Walla Union reference is the OED’s earliest documented use of “hamburger” in the sense of “chopped beef, spiced and flavoured, formed into a cake and fried,” although whether “hamburger” actually appears as a “word,” well, you be the judge:

    You are asked if you will have ‘porkchopbeefsteakhamandegghamburgersteakorliverandbacon’

33. @Hampus: Hey, whoa, calm down now. Ain’t nothing wrong with imperial measurements.

    @Ray: I usually point people at Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams for interesting use of 3D.

34. The advantage of Chinese-style dates, as 2016?1?6?, is that the characters used unambiguously distinguish years, months, and days. But Unicode support isn’t quite omnipresent yet. (Let’s see how well this goes through.)((Edit: I guess it didn’t. The three ‘?’ should be different characters.))

    And the French Republican calendar suffers from disagreement on leap-year rules. If I trust Wikipedia on this, the rules actually in force placed 1 Vendémiaire on the equinox, but our Filers seem to be using a rule of placing 1 Vendémiaire on September 22 (Gregorian).

35. Speaking as a Canadian in an environment where both dd/mm/yy and mm/dd/yy are in use I find both equally irritating, because at the beginning of every month they are ambiguous and there are rarely flags to tell me which variant is being used. The ISO format has the advantage that there is no second confusing variant. (When I set up my PC / phone /tablet about the first thing I do is convert the date / time to ISO date format and 24-hour clock.)

    Orally, I’m far more likely to say “the sixth of January” (or maybe just “Epiphany”) than “January 6th”, which sounds to me like referring to a monarch.

36. It is, but the books [Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries] are miles better. I write this as one who never thought to be interested in a 20’s flapper in Australia – but is. I now own the whole series.

    I tried the first one, Cocaine Blues, but gave up on it. Do they improve or are they just something that’s not for me?

37. As someone has already invoked xkcd, this seems appropriate to the date discussion too:

    https://xkcd.com/927/

    International standards always seem to end up pleasing precisely no-one…

38. Concerning 3D movies, someone else have seen this absolutely pioneering work ?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Courage

    It just totally blew me away when I saw it 20 years ago in a theme park in France (Futuroscope, anyone ?). Arguably the first attempt by someone to do cinema in 3D, not just spectacular gimmicks. When Avatar came out so much later I felt privileged to have had this experience before.

39. Change the date format and this American will have no clue what the date is. I’ve never had to do anything ISO standard. All companies I’ve worked for have been American. This would be one of the things I’m totally Americancentric about.

    We aren’t wrong we are different. In our own special way. Month/day/year coming soon to your country as part of our global dominance plan. Bwahaha

40. I’ve been trying to keep out of the Great Date Debate, on the basis of “Mike’s blog, Mike’s rules”, but my inner etymologist insists on pointing out that if you’re going to include the year, putting the month anywhere other than in the middle may not be weird, but it is certainly eccentric.

    (posted Julian Date 2457394.120139)

41. Jim Henley — It must have temporarily escaped your attention, but you are not in Rome, nor even in the USA, but on the internet.

42. Before being used for a sandwich, a hamburger was a grape and then a hen. It do get around.

    When did Hamburglar first appear? 1975. His full name is/was Hamilton B. Urglar. His parents obviously wanted him to go into a life of crime.

43. So I just realised I attributed something to Ray when it was actually Joe H. I am such a dumbass tonight.

    Anyway, it’s true, I do normally point people at Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams as an interesting use of 3D.

    Also, Miike Takashi doesn’t do too bad a job framing up pleasant 3D scenes in his adaptation of Hara-Kiri – although I don’t think it was particularly necessary, and actually Kobayashi’s version is probably the better film.

44. James: Speaking as a Canadian in an environment where both dd/mm/yy and mm/dd/yy are in use I find both equally irritating

    It’s probably my software developer background, but I feel this way, too. Putting year first makes the fastest transition from eyes to brain in terms of registering the meaning. Also, it appears that at some point the dash was elided from titles; I thought the dash really helped readability.

    Pixel Scroll 1/5/16 A Fine and Pixeled Place
    Pixel Scroll 1/4/16 Reach For The Pixels
    Pixel Scroll 1/3/16 The Man from P.I.X.E.L
    Pixel Scroll 1/5/17 A Fist Full of Pixels
    Pixel Scroll 1/4/17 For A Few Pixels More
    Pixel Scroll 1/3/17 Was That Avatar Sequel Crap or What?

    Pixel Scroll 2016/1/5 — A Fine and Pixeled Place
    Pixel Scroll 2016/1/4 — Reach For The Pixels
    Pixel Scroll 2016/1/3 — The Man from P.I.X.E.L
    Pixel Scroll 2017/1/5 — A Fist Full of Pixels
    Pixel Scroll 2017/1/4 — For A Few Pixels More
    Pixel Scroll 2017/1/3 — Was That Avatar Sequel Crap or What?

45. I’ll tell you one thing about 3-d–Captain Eo does NOT hold up.

    Went to see it on a whim when they were playing it at Epcot as the final showing. Then my husband and I had to explain about the Eighties to his two teenage sons.

46. I am reminded of Stewart Lee’s lengthy stand-up routine about the shocking terrorist attacks in America on the 9th of November.

47. @JJ:

    I agree that switching to day/month/year format would be bad, since it would change the order of the previously-used month/day ; but year-month-day (note, with dash seaprators rather than slash ones) both keeps the old month-day order intact, as well as adding the year in a way that avoids any ambiguity.

    (Please also note the difference between the ‘slash’ ‘/’ separator and the ‘dash’ ‘-‘ one.)

    But certainly I think that the second set of titles of the format “Pixel Scroll 2016-01-05 – A Fine and Pixeled Place” makes it much easier to follow, and indeed sort the sequence in order.

48. Christian Brunschen: but year-month-day (note, with dash separators rather than slash ones) both keeps the old month-day order intact, as well as adding the year in a way that avoids any ambiguity.

    Hmmm, you may be right.

    Pixel Scroll 2016-1-5 — A Fine and Pixeled Place
    Pixel Scroll 2016-1-4 — Reach For The Pixels
    Pixel Scroll 2016-1-3 — The Man from P.I.X.E.L
    Pixel Scroll 2017-1-5 — A Fist Full of Pixels
    Pixel Scroll 2017-1-4 — For A Few Pixels More
    Pixel Scroll 2017-1-3 — Was That Avatar Sequel Crap or What?

    Pixel Scroll 2016/1/5 — A Fine and Pixeled Place
    Pixel Scroll 2016/1/4 — Reach For The Pixels
    Pixel Scroll 2016/1/3 — The Man from P.I.X.E.L
    Pixel Scroll 2017/1/5 — A Fist Full of Pixels
    Pixel Scroll 2017/1/4 — For A Few Pixels More
    Pixel Scroll 2017/1/3 — Was That Avatar Sequel Crap or What?

49. Can we now have a long and intricate argument about whether that should be an em-dash or an en-dash? Just to distract people from the date formats?

50. Rev. Bob on January 6, 2016 at 2:46 am said:

    Wait a second. If the Vile Filers agree en masse with something Amanda S. Green said, does that mean she’s an SJW?

    Gooble Gobble we accept her, one of us, one of us!

    Amanda S. Green if you’re reading this, do you wanna build a snowman? Or perhaps take turns making my SJW credential chase a shoelace?

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