I wanted to comment the same part, but I wanted to let them the benefit of the doubt, so I went to Wikipedia «date format by country» page [1], and summed up from the table how many people have "MD" vs "DM" in their date format:
DM -> 3392/5550 ~= 61.1%
MD -> 2158/5550 ~= 38.9%
Note: I ignored both green and red regions that have both "DM" and "MD" in their format.
So it is definitively not the majority of people. Using the word "some" instead would have been better, but "Many" is not totally wrong… I guess.
Probably. The statement talk about "parts of the world", and this concept of "parts" can be seen as countries, continents, surface of earth, atoms, etc. I chose to reduce it to the smallest meaningful entity concerning the concept of dates: humans. It is arbitrary, but justifiable :)
I treat "some" as an informal expression of relative quantity and "many" as an informal expression of absolute quantity. So it is valid to say many countries use "MD" and many countries use "DM", though most countries use "DM" and only some use "MD".
Yes. ISO chooses year-month-day, which puts largest component first and smallest last. This has the nice benefit that treating it as a string and doing alphanumerical sort matches the actual day sort. Ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
The main benefit of Y-M-D, is that no-one uses Y-D-M, and the 'Y' component is easily recognisable. So if you use Y-M-D, then everyone knows it's Y-M-D and there is no ambiguity.
My two favourite date formats are: (1) yyyy-MMM-dd and (2): yyyyMMdd.
Why?
(1) eliminates any ambiguity regarding interpretation. You can have an instance of a server of an unknown provenience and/or regional settings and still count on yyyy-MMM-dd to be correctly recognized.
(2) on the other hand has a nice feature of being sortable and can also be stored as an integer value if needed.
The US standard of MM/dd/yyyy is ridiculous. But it's just one of many and I'm not going to fix the world ;)
On the main topic: if anyone needs to calculate the circumference of the Universe (radius: 50bn lightyears ish) with the accuracy of the Planck distance (approximately 1.6 x 10^-30 meters), they need less than 65 digits of Pi to do so. So, as already stated, it's just a PR stunt, nothing more.
DM -> 3392/5550 ~= 61.1% MD -> 2158/5550 ~= 38.9%
Note: I ignored both green and red regions that have both "DM" and "MD" in their format.
So it is definitively not the majority of people. Using the word "some" instead would have been better, but "Many" is not totally wrong… I guess.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country#Usage_m...