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It's easy, we should have simply started counting centuries from zero. Centuries should be zero-indexed, then everything works. We do the same with people's ag
by milliams 2y ago
It's easy, we should have simply started counting centuries from zero. Centuries should be zero-indexed, then everything works.
We do the same with people's ages. For the entire initial year of your life you were zero years old. Likewise, from years 0-99, zero centuries had passed so we should call it the zeroth century!
At least this is how I justify to my students that zero-indexing makes sense. Everyone's fought the x-century vs x-hundreds before so they welcome relief.
Izzard had the right idea: https://youtu.be/uVMGPMu596Y?si=1aKZ2xRavJgOmgE8&t=643 https://youtu.be/uVMGPMu596Y?si=1aKZ2xRavJgOmgE8&t=643
- mmmmmbop 2y ago> We do the same with people's ages. No, we don't. When we refer to 'the first year of life', we mean the time from birth until you turn 1. Similarly, you'd say something like 'you're a child in the first decade of your life and slowly start to mature into a young adult by the end of the second decade', referring to 0-9 and 10-19, respectively.
- jcelerier 2y agoThe first year of life is the year indexed with zero, just like the first centimeter/inch in a ruler is the centimeter/inch indexed with zero
- Uehreka 2y ago> No, we don't. But practically speaking we usually do. I always hear people refer to events in their life happening “when I was 26” and never “in the 27th year of my life”. Sure you could say the latter, but practically speaking people don’t (at least in English).
- mjmahone17 2y ago“Half one” is archaic English, and common German, for 12:30. Similarly “my 27th year” just sounds archaic to me: I wonder if you went through a bunch of 19th century writing if you’d see ages more often be “Xth year” vs “X-1 years old”. There may be something cultural that caused such a shift, like a change in how math or reading is taught (or even that it’s nearly universally taught, which changes how we think and speak because now a sizeable chunk of the population thinks in visually written words rather than sounds).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- einherjae 2y agoIsn’t “half one” used as a short form of “half past one” these days, I.e. 01:30? That has been a source of confusion for someone used to the Germanic way.
- larusso 2y agoI had this exact topic with an Irish coworker who lives in Germany and has issues to convey the right time. For me as a German „half one“ is half of one so 12:30. Same for „Dreiviertel eins“ -> „threequarter one“ being 12:45 and „Viertel eins“ -> „quarter one“ being 12:15. To be fair the logic behind this is also under constant confusion as some parts of Germany rather use „viertel vor“ or „viertel nach“ -> „quarter to“ „quarter after“ and have no understanding of the three quarter business.
- beAbU 2y agoThe Irish like to say "half one" meaning "half past one". In my native timekeeping parlance "half een" means 12h30. Germanic/Dutch origin. So whenever I talk time with the locals here I repeat the time back in numerical style to avoid confusion. "The shop opens tomorrow at half ten". "Thanks, store opens at nine thirty. See you then." "No..."
- OJFord 2y ago
- furyofantares 2y agoOn your sixth birthday we put a big 5 on your cake and call you a 5 year old all year. Can't say I've ever had to refer to someone's first year or first decade of their life, but sure I'd do that if it came up. Meanwhile, 0-indexed age comes up all the time.
- drdec 2y ago> On your sixth birthday we put a big 5 on your cake and call you a 5 year old all year. If you are going to be that pedantic, I would point out that one only has one birthday. (Well, unless one's mother is extremely unlucky.)
- naniwaduni 2y ago"Birthday" does not mean the same thing as "date of birth".
- furyofantares 2y agoWell regardless the number we constantly use is 0-indexed.
- copperx 2y agoyes, birthday and birth day are different things. Just like everyday and every day have different meanings, and it isn't confusing (to most people).
- Detrytus 2y ago“Birthday” is just short for “birth day anniversary”, I guess…
- layer8 2y agobirthday != date of birth “Birthday” really means “anniversary of the date of birth”.
- samatman 2y ago
- daynthelife 2y agoMy preference is semi-compatible with both conventions: First = 0 Second = 1 Toward = 2 Third = 3 … This way, the semantic meaning of the words “first” (prior to all others) and “second” (prior to all but one) are preserved, but we get sensical indexing as well.
- kelnos 2y ago> When we refer to 'the first year of life', we mean the time from birth until you turn 1. Sure, but no one ever uses that phrasing after you turn one. Then it's just "when they were one", "when they were five", whatever. So sure, maybe we can continue to say "the 1st century", but for dates 100 and later, no more.
- rootusrootus 2y ago> Sure, but no one ever uses that phrasing after you turn one. Heck, few people say anything about 'the first year of life' even when talking about someone that young. It is too imprecise, because things change so rapidly. In my experience the most common convention is to use months to describe age before someone turns 2.
- kstrauser 2y agoWe don't 0-index people's ages. There are a million books about "baby's first year", while they're still 0 years old.
- User23 2y agoWe also talk about someone’s first day at work during that day.
- bmacho 2y agoIf you point at year long intervals, then those will be year long intervals indeed. Nevertheless the traditional "how old are you" system uses a number 1 less.
- mixmastamyk 2y agoHow old is the baby now? Six months…
- Terretta 2y agoExcept we do, as soon as we need the next digit. In "figure of speech", or conventual use, people start drinking in their 21st year, not their 22nd. In common parlance, they can vote in their 18th year, not their 19th. We talk of a child in their 10th year as being age 10. Might even be younger. Try asking a people if advice about a child in their "5th year of development" means you're dealing with a 5 year old. Most will say yes. So perhaps it's logical to count from zero when there's no digit in the magnitude place, because you haven't achieved a full unit till you reach the need for the unit. Arguably a baby at 9 months isn't in their first year as they've experienced zero years yet! Similarly "centuries" don't have a century digit until the 100s, which would make that the 1st century and just call time spans less than that "in the first hundred years" (same syllables anyway). It's unsatisfying, but solves the off by one errors, one of the two hardest problems in computer science along with caching and naming things.
- kdmccormick 2y agoWhat? No. When you are 0, it is your first year. When you are 21, you have begun your 22nd year. In the US you are legal to drink in your 22nd year of life. You are correct that nobody says "22nd year" in this context, but nobody says "21st year" either. The former is awkward but the latter is just incorrect.
- drewcoo 2y ago> we should have simply started counting centuries from zero Latin, like Lua, is 1-indexed.
- usrusr 2y agoAnd look at the bloodshed that caused! https://douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html https://douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html
- IshKebab 2y agoI feel like the Romans had an excuse for that mistake. Not sure about Lua.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoI don't think it is a mistake for Lua. The convention to zero-index arrays is not sacrosanct, it's just the way older languages did it (due to implementation details) and thus how people continue to do it. But it's very counter-intuitive, and I think it's fair game for new languages to challenge assumptions that we hold because we're used to past languages.
- antonvs 2y agoIt's not counter-intuitive at all, it only seems that way because people are now used to languages with zero-based indexing. That's almost entirely because of the C language, which used pointer offset arithmetic with its arrays. Outside of that machine context, where an array is a contiguous block of RAM that can be indexed with memory pointers, there's no particular reason to do offset indexing. 1-based works just fine - "first element, second element" - works just fine and is perfectly intuitive. Different types of indexing can make sense in different situations. Some languages even allow that. In Ada, for example, arrays can start at whatever index you define.
- IshKebab 2y ago> 1-based works just fine It really doesn't. You can make it work obviously but you end up with much less elegant code, with +1 and -1 all over the place. E.g. for accessing a row of a matrix you get [width(i-1)+1, widthi+1) instead of the far saner [widthi, (width+1)i) Generic code also becomes much more awkward.
- munchler 2y agoIf people start saying “zeroth century”, it’s only going to create confusion, because “first century” will then become ambiguous.
- Tade0 2y ago> We do the same with people's ages. For the entire initial year of your life you were zero years old. This wasn't the case in South Korea until recently: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/28/why-are-south-koreans-one-year-younger-today https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/28/why-are-south-korea...
- nox101 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning
- eddieroger 2y agoYour metaphor is comparing apples and oranges. When we could life, it's "one year old" or "aged one year," both of which mark the completion of a milestone. Using the term "18th century" is all-encompassing of that year, which is a different use case. When one recollects over the course of someone's life, like in a memoir, it would be normal to say "in my 21st year", referring to the time between turn 20 years old and 21 years old.