Designing content for people who struggle with numbers
service-manual.nhs.uk
service-manual.nhs.uk
Is "from 15 to 20" more clear, without context on any of these? Or is it always context dependent? How about "between 15 and 20"?
This starts with "The ATM is in the lobby", so there's no reason to think it's in the restaurant. The "between the elevators and the restaurant" gives you a clue that if you go to the lobby and see either the elevators or the restaurant, but not both, keep going until you see the other one and once you do see the other one, you've passed where the ATM is.
This is kind of a bad example for if between means a closed or open interval, however, since neither the elevators nor the restaurant are non-occupying boundaries, but rather places that could be occupied by an ATM. However, if the ATM is found at the elevators or in the restaurant, you wouldn't describe the location of the ATM relative to both of these, you'd describe the location as at/inside one of them. You might say, though, that the ATM is at the elevators, (with the elevators being) {near,after,before} the restaurant, to explain where the elevators are.
That page doesn’t follow its own advice. It recommends against contracting “you have”, but goes on to do so later in the page. Contradictions are always a bit funny on a style guide because of the imperative voice.
That wouldn't be true even if children were randomly assigned to classrooms.
> I get that dyslexia is worse because you have to be able to read to learn anything
That... also doesn't come close to being true.
About as accurate as saying that "if you see two children, it's pretty much guaranteed that they're not both girls".
That's not something that anyone would accept as accurate.
For example, if you have 9 boys and 1 girl in a room, and pick one at random, you're not guaranteed to get a boy, but you're pretty much guaranteed to get a boy. It's a wishy-washy way of saying the most likely outcome by a decent margin.
Weirdly though, “it's pretty much guaranteed that they're not both girls” sounds unacceptable to me, but “it's pretty much guaranteed that at least one of them is a boy” sounds ok-ish, even though they’re equivalent.
Things like “almost always”, “nearly guaranteed”, “effectively never” also adjust their meaning relative to context in ways we are not aware of.
There isn’t a solution to different people having different instincts about these numbers, except being aware of the issue, and not trying to project one person’s intuitions as being the “right” intuitions.
Rather, they're making the statements they do because they feel that 17 one-in-seventeen chances must add up to one 100% chance, or because they can't tell the difference between 50% and 75%, and they don't feel like checking to see whether the things they're saying make any sense.
(Teasing. I’ve always thought the US MM/DD/YYYY format makes absolutely no sense. Why don’t the units go small, bigger, biggest? Why do we continue to put up with that?)
Only YYYY/MM/DD HH24:MI:SS makes sense. Choose your sepators.
YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS has its place as well, but not here.
How do you write the year? Do you put decade before century?
How do you write numbers? Do you put the ones place before the tens?
Toddmorey asked why units don’t go from small to large and I explained that it is inconsistent with how we write numbers.
Thus, there’s no logical reason to do anything other than large to small. Anything other than ISO 8601 is preferred only for familiarity and no such inconsistent format is inherently more correct or logical.
No, because the seconds are rarely important.
>How do you write the year? Do you put decade before century?
No, because that's not how numbers work.
>How do you write numbers? Do you put the ones place before the tens?
Same answer.
>Toddmorey asked why units don’t go from small to large and I explained that it is inconsistent with how we write numbers.
Dates aren't numbers. There is a lot more context and meaning around dates that we need to consider when we verbalise and write them. But, for the purposes of e.g. data storage then absolutely - we can consider them no different from numbers. You have to understand that isn't the case with conversational English, though.
Yes, conversational english is arbitrary. The preference there is the familiar so the listener understands. But both commonly used date formats (MM/DD/YYYY HH:MI:SS and DD/MM/YYYY HH:MI:SS) are inconsistent and arbitrary. You can’t say one makes more sense than the other because that’s just a matter of personal familiarity.
If you need sorting, use a tool that understands dates, simple as that. Many tools do, just some common businesss microsoft tools don't.
Humans think day/month or month/day, they have absolutely no interest in reading the year first.
But this is a conversation about text formatting of dates. The standards for this are well established. Yes, padding is required and assumed.
> Humans think day/month or month/day, they have absolutely no interest in reading the year first.
Humans prefer what is familiar. Speaking as a human, for me that’s ISO 8601.
No need. ISO 2014 was recommended in 1971 and issued in 1973.
If you have chosen any other textual representation of date and time for data interchange you are in a very literal sense doing it wrong.
Hand-written accounting journals, day books, have date ordering built into their physical substrate. It didn't matter how dates were given orally (some places: "today is the 23rd of June 1844"; others: "it's June 23, 1844 today"); nor did it matter that this ordering was transcribed onto the paper, using month numbers rather than the names of the months.
Now we do need to sort dates, so let's turn Japanese.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Japa...
today is 202309sep21
because i use it for filenames, i don't put in extra punctuation, there are enough cues in the format as is. To really see it, imagine scanning a list of files with different dates
it will still collate properly mixed with languages other than english
202304abr22 - My Spanish appointment
202304apr15 - My English appointment
202304avr07 - My French appointment
20230407avr - My French appointment
20230415apr - My English appointment
20230422abr - My Spanish appointment 20230915sepFRI
2023.09.15.sep.fri
2023.09.05.rab.sep.fri
2023.09.05.3watrab.sep.3fri
(In the US we could name years in the form: 4th year of Roosevelt, etc.)
1023 (1000, 100, 10, 1)
123.456 (100, …, 0.001)
To save screen space I often use decimals in file names:
2023.05.23 Design SummaryWhen we're saying a date out loud, we Americans tend to say, "September 21st, 2023," whereas I've noticed many of the Brits I've worked with have tended to say, "21st September, 2023," sometimes with an "of" after the day. Those spoken word orders were carried over into the written form, is my suspicion.
If the the month was unclear you might reply with "21st of what?" but you'd never expect an answer of just "September" to the question "What's the date?".
My assumption was it's due to an attempt to make the written date format closer to the HH:MM, and they just forgot about the years, with the spoken "Month, DayOfMonth" coming later.
Do people in the US generally say "the 4th of July" or "July, 4th" more? That might hint at an origin.
As for why the month comes first, I get the feeling we Americans care about precision up to a month and less so about the numerical day such as "When does school start?" with an answer of "School starts in September". Obviously people need the precise date if you actually have a student going, but in a lot of conversation, people are just looking for the month. I can imagine that being even more true in earlier times.
We also peg things to months such as our elections being the second Tuesday of November or Labor Day being the first Monday of September. Note that in those phrases we are putting the day kind of first, but not in a particular numerical way. The month is what sticks out as a rough guesstimate of the time period.
An interesting point is that the NHS has to deal with many languages and people that don't have English as a first language. That's another reason for being very explicit.
None of this helps with organizing photo libraries, legal documents and video archives.
/s but maybe not…
"It's double"
Spurious use of % is Hard.
Fractions can be more comprehensible than decimals half as big vs 0.5 can you really be confident 0.00125 is a meaningful value applied to 2mm? Its less than 1% bigger.. approximations are useful.
I bet more people know what a right angle is than know its 90° or the equivalent in radians
Additive:
“The price went up 200%”
New price = 100% + 200% = 300%
(1.00 + 2.00 = 3.00)
“The price is 300% of the original”
New price = 100% x 300% = 300%
(1.00 x 3.00 = 3.00)