UK vs US date writing

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It was only relatively recently that I realised that the transposition of day and month that each does, also translates to the written out form. So in the US it’s common to say April 1st, whereas in the UK most would say 1st of April.

The most convenient way for most dates on a computer is yyyy-mm-dd however, so they always sort easily. You may have realised this when adding dates to filenames. Though a lot of software uses UNIX time which is, as you would expect, is “defined as the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), Thursday, 1 January 1970, not counting leap seconds." So midday on the 12th March this year (or March 12th) at midday is of course 1426161600.

Published 12 Mar 2015

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The half-life of caffeine is about 4 hours. The data vary, but for a medium-sized adult, you can probably expect half of the caffeine from that 3 pm cup of coffee to still be doing half of its thing about 7 pm, 4 hours later. Apparently, smokers deal with caffeine quicker, and caffeine sticks around in children much longer. You can expect about 10 minutes before it first kicks in, which, I suppose, is why if you’re feeling tired while driving, it’s a decent plan to take a break and drink a coffee, then have a 15-minute nap. Once it starts to kick in, you might hit peak caffeine any time from 45 minutes to 2 hours later. Caveat: The chart visualisation is extrapolated from reported data, so the shape is only approximate. Some references say longer, and some say from 3-9 hours or so. My source, which seemed pretty comprehensive, was: Bertil B. Fredholm, Karl Bättig, Janet Holmén, Astrid Nehlig and Edwin E. Zvartau, Actions of Caffeine in the Brain with Special Reference to Factors That Contribute to Its Widespread Use, Pharmacological Reviews March 1999, 51 (1) 83-133; Also see: tiredness can kill, take a break.…The half-life of caffeine is about 4 hours. The data vary, but for a medium-sized adult, you can probably expect half of the caffeine from that 3 pm cup of coffee to still be doing half of its thing about 7 pm, 4 hours later. Apparently, smokers deal with caffeine quicker, and caffeine sticks around in children much longer. You can expect about 10 minutes before it first kicks in, which, I suppose, is why if you’re feeling tired while driving, it’s a decent plan to take a break and drink a coffee, then have a 15-minute nap. Once it starts to kick in, you might hit peak caffeine any time from 45 minutes to 2 hours later. Caveat: The chart visualisation is extrapolated from reported data, so the shape is only approximate. Some references say longer, and some say from 3-9 hours or so. My source, which seemed pretty comprehensive, was: Bertil B. Fredholm, Karl Bättig, Janet Holmén, Astrid Nehlig and Edwin E. Zvartau, Actions of Caffeine in the Brain with Special Reference to Factors That Contribute to Its Widespread Use, Pharmacological Reviews March 1999, 51 (1) 83-133; Also see: tiredness can kill, take a break.

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