International Date Format Campaign

02008-10-06 | Internet

International Date Format Campaign
The Internet is a truly International method of communicating – there are no political or cultural boundaries drawn on the www page you call up – the page could have been stored in the Smithsonian Institute or on a small server in a basement in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Often, you have no way of telling. So, if anyone in the world can read your page, why not ensure that any date references on that page can be read correctly and unambiguously by that person, by using the ISO 8601:1988 International Date Format.
So what is this date format?

CCYY-MM-DD

where CC is the century (representing the digits used in the thousands and hundreds components, as opposed to the actual century), YY is the year, MM is the month of the year between 01 (January) and 12 (December), and DD is the day of the month between 01 and 28 or 29 or 30 or 31, depending on length of month and whether it is a leap year. These dates are using the Gregorian calendar.

For example : 2001-01-15 is the fifteenth of January in the year two thousand and one A.D. – completely unambiguous

Agreed!!

WWW : Books : Oral Communication

02008-08-03 | Internet, Musings, Reading

If the world wide web is global and books are cosmopolitan, storytelling and oral communication are local. (I am paraphrasing David Abram)

It seems to me that the third option, story-telling, is vastly different from the first two.
In all three instances molecules are moved and energy is transferred, but only the last one exchanges energy directly between the content-creator and the listener/receiver. Breath is expelled, air is shaped and propelled and received by ears and interpreted. Pheromones are exchanged, scents are traded and we can get a feel for the other person that is more than the sum of their talk. The story is not contained in words alone, it is the entire presence of the speaker.

Without the support of a local engagement, that is to say oral communication and person-to-person(s) conversation, the other two become a card house, lacking a real foundation.