ISO date and time

[moved from here]

10/10 for using ISO format Date and Time in the log file name, it is so effectively informative!

Thanks. :-)

I use the format pretty much exclusively (even on written things at work – after ~nine years, the girls have gotten used to my backwards dates) as it is a much simpler way to read and use dates – the biggest bit is at one end, the smallest at the other, and with files it sorts nicely.

Yes. Big bits on the left, smal bits on the right, like other numbers.

I converted to that maybe 20 years ago.

There is a nursery rhyme containing “four and twenty blackbirds”, and I know counting in German has the tens and units swapped, but… we’re mostly consistent about numbers, it’s just dates that we do the wrong way round.

Sort of like top-posting.

Actually, it’s the Japanese word for hedgehog. So now you know. ;-)

I believe you, of course – but why is there a Japanese word for hedgehog? Well … I suppose that’s like asking, “Why is there an English word for elephant?”

“Why is there an English word for elephant?”

because of English history in India and Africa?

but why is there a Japanese word for hedgehog? Well … I suppose that’s like asking, “Why is there an English word for elephant?”

The combined answer is that hedgehogs are distributed (naturally) across a large portion of Europe, the middle east, Africa and central Asia so local names for them are going to exist across the distribution area. The human assisted extended distribution adds to that.
The elephant part of the query really follows the origins of various parts of English.
As everyone appreciates English is a complex agglomeration of words and terms derived from other languages. In the case of elephant I believe it is Phoenician via Greek and into western European languages.

OK, where’s Gavin?

Yup – there’s a species of hedgehog in China. But none in Japan.

And of course Japan had an empire that included much of China at one time, just as Britain had an empire that included India – hence the latter part of my post.

OK, where’s Gavin?

Lurking, lurking. Origins of words for birds and animals are interesting in the case of non-indigenous creatures as indicators of how news was brought back by travellers. When was the first elephant sighted in Britain, I wonder? Did the Romans bring any to impress the natives? My guess is that way back in the stone age there was sufficient trading and travelling for everybody to have heard of elephants, and doubtless many more fanciful wonders. There is a special exhibition on at the Glyptotek in Copenhagen at the moment, showing archaeological finds from the sea around Sicily. One of the exhibits is the skull of a pygmy elephant, which used to be native to that part of North Africa. The adjacency of the eye sockets may well have given rise to the belief in the existence of the Cyclopes.

And is the unicorn a traveller’s tale of a misunderstood rhinoceros? Possibly confounded by the finding of narwhal tusks (not attached to narwhals)?

Unicorns are fairly common in Roman mosaics, along with hippocamps, creatures with mammalian foreparts and fishy hindparts. The boundary between fact and fantasy is only a recent invention, after all, a bit like childhood. Pontius Pilate may well have asked What is truth? but it was only in 1933 that his question was given a rigorous answer, by Alfred Tarski.