I N S I D E T H I S I S S U E

and April 5 th still marks the start of theUK Taxation Year.What I have just written is a muchsimplifiedversion of the story. A recentbook that delves into minute detail onthe history of our calendar is DuncanSteel’s Marking Time (John Wiley & Sons,New York, 2000). A similar book (with aslightly pompous title) is David Duncan’sCalendar: Humanity’s Epic Struggle toDetermine a True and Accurate Year (AvonBooks, New York, 1998). A lighter read isIsaac Asimov’s The Clock We Live On(Collier, New York, 1963), but this hasbecome hard to find. (My copy is a batteredpaperback.)* * *Expect widespread confusion over datesin the coming year. Despite all the hooplalast year about Y2K and the demise ofcivilization, very little attention has beenpaid to the fact that the world has notsettled on an unambiguous date standardfor printed records and forms. Up untilnow we have suffered with DD/MM/YYand the U.S. variant MM/DD/YY. I havealso seen YY/MM/DD. The year 2000 wasa grace period, since “00” could onlyrepresent the year. Now we will be presentedwith dates like 03/02/01, and we will beleft scratching our heads. In these pagestwo years ago, I made a plea to adopt theISO date standard: YYYY-MM-DD. I willnot repeat my argument; I think thestandard speaks for itself. Since that time,several people have criticized the standardon the basis of its awkwardness in speechand writing: it is simply not the way weexpress ourselves colloquially. To this Iwould have to agree. ISO never meant tostandardize speech and writing, only inthe representation of dates used inelectronic data processing andcommunication. By all means say “Thesecond of January, 2001” or write “2001January 1” if you want. My amended appealis “please use the ISO standard in caseswhere only numbers are used to representthe date.” Be careful out there.David Chapman is a Life Member of theRASC and a past President of the HalifaxCentre. Visit his astronomy page atwww3.ns.sympatico.ca/dave.chapman/astronomy_page.As they say…be careful whatyou wish for…!December/ décembre 2000 JRASC233