Comments on: GM. What’s the Big Deal Anyway?

By: Shawn

Shawn — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 01:42:40 +0000

Maybe it only works for digits that are not significant figures. The significant figures of a number are those digits that carry meaning contributing to its precision. This includes all digits except:

All leading zeros;
Trailing zeros when they are merely placeholders to indicate the scale of the number
Spurious digits introduced, for example, by calculations carried out to greater precision than that of the original data, or measurements reported to a greater precision than the equipment supports.

e.g., For A.D. 2009, all digits are significant, but for May 05, the 0 is not significant.

By: strauss

strauss — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 13:05:09 +0000

I could not agree with Mike more — and to imagine the world calls US crazy!!

Just think of the children!

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 05:02:02 +0000

I know I’m way behind on this, I’m just catching up on my Math Factor podcasts, I went through THE ENTIRE DECADE thinking I was alone on this, no leading zeros, not just because it’s sloppy and inconsistent, but for pure aesthetic reasons. Either zero pad all of them or none, couldn’t even convince my wife I was right, so there are the odd incidents of my rebellion in the checkbook and a few other places. These children deserve better than having an ambivalent date representation of their birth.

By: Blaine

Blaine — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:08:00 +0000

The bigger question is what are we going to call next year? Is it “two thousand ten” or is it “twenty ten”?

By: notovny

notovny — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:07:49 +0000

Personally, in every situation I’ve been allowed to set the number of digits in a date, I’ve written all three numbers, including the year date, without leading zeroes, back to 2000, and further.
However, for some reason, writing ‘9 instead of ’09 still feels wrong to me, so this is the first time I’ve ever deliberately done that.