Does Anybody Ever Get This Right?

[Roger Sully]

Here's my take on it..for what it's worth. I work for a phone company and one of the products we sell are DID numbers. Direct Inward Dialing numbers that are sold in blocks of 20 however they're usually puchased in blocks of 100....So The first block of 20 phone numbers would be
555-0000 thru 555-0019 or 100 numbers would be 555-0000 thru 555-0099. As you can see the zero's can actually have a value..
Ok ima shut up now.

 

[was.lost.but.now.found]

It looks like the tenth, and last year of our first decade is already named "10"! What went wrong? :thinking: Looking at our first decade, it looks like we have met all the proper requirements, ten consecutive years, humm. It looks to me like we're going to have to call the "first" year of our second decade "11". 🙂

At this point I'm open to any possible solutions, as to how to remedy this situation, and am eagerly awaiting your responses. 🙂

Dave

I'm by no means a mathemetician, but I'll go along with your reasoning here and come up with a different conclusion.

How old are you when you are born? The answer obviously is you are 0 years old. You don't get to be '1' until you reach your first birthday.

So now, very technically speaking, when do you complete your first ten years of life? The answer is you complete your first ten years of life at precisely the moment before the time of day you were born on the day of your 10th birthday. Let me explain. Let's keep it simple and say you were born at 12:00am 1/1/2000. You would complete your first 10 years of life at 11:59pm 12/31/2009. And when do you begin your second 10 years of your life? Precisely after turning 10 years old which in this example would be at 12:00am 1/1/2010 (well before you reach 11 years old on 1/1/2011).

 

[jtr1962]

At this point I'm open to any possible solutions, as to how to remedy this situation, and am eagerly awaiting your responses. 🙂

Easy-to make the system society usually uses to mean decades work, all we need to do is include 1 BC in the first decade, or better yet just not worry about the first decade at all, even if it ends up being only 9 years. It's not like that many people care what happened that long ago anyway. The alternative is that we start referring to the 60s as 1961 through 1970, the 70s as 1971 through 1980, etc. We'll have to rewrite entire texts, not to mention it'll confuse the hell out of almost everyone. A year zero really should have been included in between 1 BC and 1 AD, but for whatever reason it wasn't. If we were to add it now ( i.e. 1 BC = year 0 ), it would throw off all the BC dates by a year. I suppose that's the least disruptive solution if we absolutely have to have mathematically consistent decades starting from year 0. After all, a lot of BC dates are uncertain by more than a year anyway.

In the end, I'll vote to keep the popular usage of decades, centuries, millenia. In 100,000 years, nobody is even going to care if the first decade/century, millenium was short a year. Or maybe someone will finally decide to add a year zero.

 

[russthetoolman]

I want someone to tell me the roman numeral for zero?
think about it......
Russ

 

[TorchBoy]

Those are all examples of counting where the item being counted is inherently in discrete units. Time can't be counted, only measured. Any physical quantity which can be measured starts at 0. This is true of time, mass, temperature, etc. All scales start at zero, and can deal with infinitesimally small quantities ( temperatures billionths of a degree above absolute zero, picoseconds, nanograms to name a few ).

You may have missed my post where I pointed out that we're counting years, not measuring time. Also, the numbers assigned to these years is not a scale. The years are discrete units (as 45/70 said), just like the counting cars example you use. Why the conceptual problem with this?

How old are you when you are born? The answer obviously is you are 0 years old. You don't get to be '1' until you reach your first birthday.

Straight away you're trying to measure time - the age of a person - not counting years. FWIW Koreans do count years for day-today-day usage, so count it as 1 up till the first birthday. In other words, they refer to which year of life a person is in; for example, a 79 year old woman is in her 80th year. But bringing that up is going to confuse another whole batch of people.

 

[was.lost.but.now.found]

I want someone to tell me the roman numeral for zero?
think about it......
Russ

Here you go:




Did you get that?

 

[was.lost.but.now.found]

Is the US Census Bureau wrong too?

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CENSUS_KICKOFF?SITE=MOSTP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

 

[russthetoolman]

........

 

[russthetoolman]

.....

 

[was.lost.but.now.found]

It worries me how stupid people are 🙁
45/70 is correct, as is all the rest of us that agree with him.
It starts at 1.
Show me roman numeral zero...
I can't believe how many of you can't count!! WOW, I am floored...

Would you believe the National Institute of Standards and Technology as a credible source? They, btw, in case you did not know are the organization that maintains the official US time by atomic clock in Boulder, CO.

Please note how they list 'decades' starting with years ending in zeros.

http://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/photoncs/html/table.html

I sir, am not stupid; I have presented a number of documented links to the forum and I frankly don't know how else to convince someone who does not want to believe the facts they read.

 

[45/70]

.....we're counting years, not measuring time.

This is precisely the point I was trying to make. As I said in my last post, you either have a year or you don't. There are no fractional quantities involved. Time has nothing to do with it. If we were counting people instead of years, a newborn counts as one, just the same as a 100 year old adult. They each count as one. The same goes for counting years.

I might also mention that to solve the problem in my last post, you can't fudge the facts, create 9 year decades, or otherwise change the rules that already exist, as some others have suggested. It is what it is, and that's all we have to work with.

In case anybody is wondering, I'm not developing high blood pressure nor, am I worried about this in any other way. 🙂 I went through this discussion in 2000-2001 many times. There was never any winner. At that time, the discussion among groups of people seemed to always end in a 50/50 split. It's just that I can't figure out why that is, when the answer is so obvious. If you can count to ten, it's really easy to come to the correct conclusion.

Dave

 

[jtr1962]

I might also mention that to solve the problem in my last post, you can't fudge the facts, create 9 year decades, or otherwise change the rules that already exist, as some others have suggested. It is what it is, and that's all we have to work with.

And here is the solution to the problem:

Astronomical year numbering is based on AD (Anno Domini)/CE (Common Era) year numbering, but follows normal decimal integer numbering more strictly. Thus, it has a year 0, the years before that are designated with negative numbers and the years after that are designated with positive numbers.

The prefix AD and the suffixes CE, BC or BCE (Common Era, Before Christ or Before Common Era) are dropped. The year 1 BC/BCE is numbered 0, the year 2 BC is numbered −1, and in general the year n BC/BCE is numbered "−(n − 1)" (a negative number equal to 1 − n). The numbers of AD/CE years are not changed and are written with either no sign or a positive sign; thus in general n AD/CE is simply n or +n. For normal calculation a number zero is often needed, here most notably when calculating the number of years in a period that spans the epoch; the end years need only be subtracted from each other.

So it turns out there is actually a system in use which already has a year 0. Even better, AD years are the same as now. As we start from 0, the first decade is 0-9, the next 10-19, etc. Problem solved. Granted, BC years are now negative and offset by one, but frankly who cares? Outside of historians, there aren't very many who care about events occurring that long ago.

 

[RWT1405]

I care jtr, because it is not correct math.

My .02 FWIW YMMV

 

[LuxLuthor]

To change the agreed upon 1 AD starting point, you need to make another DeLorean Flux Capacitor time travel machine, get the appropriate monk robes, go back to 400AD and kill Dionysius, and take over his identity and rework his system to start at 0 AD.

Then get another appropriate set of robes and move forward to 715AD and kill Bede and now take over his identity to use your earlier subsumed Dionysius system, add a BC category, again confirm zero as the starting point, and do your best to sell it to King Charlemagne.

If the King doesn't buy it, be prepared to take over his identity, being careful not to run into yourself posing as Bede when he talks to you.

You can do it, but it will get messy. Hopefully it won't change the space time continuum enough to prevent your existence today, or you won't be here to fix the problem.

The fact that the calendar still starts at 1AD means you are wasting time talking about it, rather than working on the Flux Capacitor.

 

[was.lost.but.now.found]

To change the agreed upon 1 AD starting point, you need to make another DeLorean Flux Capacitor time travel machine, get the appropriate monk robes, go back to 400AD and kill Dionysius, and take over his identity and rework his system to start at 0 AD.

Then get another appropriate set of robes and move forward to 715AD and kill Bede and now take over his identity to use your earlier subsumed Dionysius system, add a BC category, again confirm zero as the starting point, and do your best to sell it to King Charlemagne.

If the King doesn't buy it, be prepared to take over his identity, being careful not to run into yourself posing as Bede when he talks to you.

You can do it, but it will get messy. Hopefully it won't change the space time continuum enough to prevent your existence today, or you won't be here to fix the problem.

The fact that the calendar still starts at 1AD means you are wasting time talking about it, rather than working on the Flux Capacitor.

Almost sounds like you'd instead need a flying telephone booth to go on your excellent adventure.

 

[MCFLYFYTER]

I did not think that they understood zero or negative numbers. If that is true, how could they assign it a symbol?

I want someone to tell me the roman numeral for zero?
think about it......
Russ

Why does a century have to begin at 1AD? Can a new century not start at 15:42:57 tomorrow? It seems most convenient to start with 1BC for the first century.

 

[RWT1405]

Sure ******, all your $10 dollar bills are now $1 bills, because I say so and it's convenient for me to then take them from you for $1.

They understood zero had NO value, why is it so hard for you to understand that?

My .02 FWIW YMMV

 

[TorchBoy]

Isn't 1 BC presently part of the first century BC? So everyone saying that 1 BC was part of the first millennium are necessarily pushing for the first millennium BC being from 2 BC to 1001 BC. These attempts to fix something that's not broken get worse and worse.

As LuxLuthor's example shows, you'd have to do an awful lot to get the math to work out ("Start counting with zero? Are you crazy, Dionysius/Bede/Charlemagne?") but then you'd have the problem of starting to count with zero - the first year would be the zeroth year. Ugh. And we would have to be in the second millennium now, not the third. Double ugh. You'd have people ever after pushing for a change to our present system to "make it right".

How ridiculous. And all apparently just because some people can't count.

 

[TorchBoy]

Isn't 1 BC presently part of the first century BC? So everyone saying that 1 BC was part of the first millennium are necessarily pushing for the first millennium BC being from 2 BC to 1001 BC. These attempts to fix something that's not broken get worse and worse.

Of course, you people who can't count and thereby find the present system intolerable could fix it (to the first millennium starting in 999 BC)... by renumbering all BC years by a count of 2 and having two zero years!

:devil:

 

[LuxLuthor]

Since this all started as religious edicts, or at best--the pedantic plodding of some hapless monks, I'm surprised the suggestion isn't being made to just dissolve the entire BC/AD strategy. Erase the Christ-pivot-point, and VOILA, the problem goes away....no more religious dictums interfering with science.

Once you get that worked out, then just start taking over other countries and cultures, and inform them of the new zero system they will be using.

Although it may appear a zero sum game, imagine the fun of starting the zero calendar point with the precise moment of creation.