Standards roundup

Back to English standards for the moment, I also gave a little linky to a page about the word combination “had been being”. While I was unsure of its validity when it came to me, the page seemed very convincing; I had merely been using the Past Perfect Progressive tense. As I feel slightly cheated from not having been taught the edge cases of English grammar (perhaps because my school did not teach Latin), I had a look over that page and my brain soon melted. It took several minutes to even understand what “The food will have been being eaten.” means, and I don’t think I am going to remember that this is called the “Modal Perfect Progressive” tense. Hopefully that won’t limit my ability to speak in other languages. It also took several minutes for me to come up with an example of when one might use that sentence. I decided upon:

“You see behind me the mountain of food which is part of this year’s Texas Food Pile Contest. Competitors from all over the state have been coming here for days to take a bite out of it, and it is now down to just the size of a small house. By tomorrow, the food will have been being eaten by over 1000 people.”

That’s the best I can do.

Next, there was the little link in a previous blog post about kilobytes. The always informative [Wikipedia] tells us that, based on the SI, ISO 31-0 defines “k” as the correct shortening for the prefix kilo and “K” for the unit kelvin. Most software I have checked does not use this convention though, and although there is little chance of confusion in software, I see little is gained from using a different system from other fields, or even worse not having a system at all.

Standard 31-0 was a revelation to me, though, with the wikipedia article stating that “Numbers consisting of long sequences of digits can be made more readable by separating them into groups, preferably groups of three, separated by a small space.” and that “ISO 31-0 specifies that the decimal sign is the comma on the baseline…”. I thought that I had completely standardised my numerical system, using the ISO date format, crossed sevens, ticked ones and slashed zeros, I even cross my zeds sometimes to distinguish them from twos. Anyway, “in for a penny, in for a Euro”, I immediately started to use a comma as my decimal sign, at least on a trial basis. Fortunately in my official bookkeeping I am given a column for pounds and column for pence, and I rarely have to write cheques for more than £999.99. I will be writing that as £999,99 though, in future, as the bank have not complained about my ISO date format yet.

I have also adjusted my [KDE] settings to use ISO number format, so now Konqueror lists filesizes such as “73,0 KB” and “1,8 MB (1 927 547)”. While doing so, I realised that I was using slashes to separate my years, months and days, so I have set that to hyphens. As a further standard, I have set Monday as the first day of the week, with Sunday as the 7th day. This is based on the fact that “A week starts with Monday (day 1) and ends with Sunday (day 7).” according to this very helpful site about the ISO 8601 format.

The final standard I have been thinking about is, apparently, not a standard at all, so I haven’t used it yet. I have often thought that, because different cultures order people’s first and second name differently, the system of capitalising the surname made a lot of sense. For instance, the CIA World Factbook under its entry for the United Kingdom lists “head of government: Prime Minister Anthony (Tony) BLAIR” and for China lists “head of government: Premier WEN Jiabao”. Unfortunately I could find no site even advocating this system, only sites saying that the whole name should be in upper case. I will have a look around.

What would an ISO standard for blogs specify?