I don’t have anything relevant saviored. You’d be surprised how rarely it comes up*, and when it does it’s usually people talking about how ill they are under readmores (so I don’t need an add-on to let me skip it). And like I said, all in all I’m glad for the warning.
*On the Internet, I mean. It comes up a lot when grocery shopping and suchlike. (Did you know Canada doesn’t have a consistent date-writing method? Good luck figuring out whether a bar of Cracker Barrel labelled “14 DE 13” is still good. (It is. Cracker Barrel writes the year first. But you can’t generalise that to non-Cracker-Barrel products.))
{{Looks like the linked post has been access-locked, so here is my comment from it:
“You can never have enough pi. There’s always some digits you’re missing.
Besides, Canada doesn’t have a single standard date-writing method. The closest we’ve got is 2013 MR* 14, but a lot of things don’t use it. (Say you have a box of crackers. The current date is October 20th, 2012, your phobia of rotting food prevents you from eating only-just-expired crackers but you have a friend nearby who will eat them, and the expiration date on the box is “11/10/12”. What should you do with it? The correct answer is “It is impossible to say without more information on how this particular brand of crackers writes their dates.”)
*Every month-word shares at least two letters in English and French. Many share more (there’s not really a significant difference between “November” and “novembre”), and if you saw a date written “2013 Fev 03″ you could almost certainly guess what it meant even if the third letter isn’t quite right. But two letters means it can be completely consistently written.”}}
Tags:
#tales from the askbox #I hardly ever eat strawberries anyway #I got a rash after eating strawberry baby food #so I spent like fifteen years thinking I was allergic #and when I got up the nerve to try them I found them a bit of a let-down #too crunchy #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #our home and cherished land
Brinens and Things 