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South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

independent.co.uk

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Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#101

Post by Symbiote »

petesergeant wrote: post #30
rhplus wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that weird - I'm sure most folks spend their school-years referring to other kids as "the same year (grade) as me" or "the year (grade) above/below me". Even to this day, I intuitively group friends based on the academic year group they were in.

> Even to this day, I intuitively group friends based on the academic year group they were in How far out of school are you?

I left university over 10 years ago, but I'm still aware of those friends who were in my year, vs others who were a year or two ahead or behind.

People from my year are the ones I lived with, did group projects with, worked until midnight trying to solve a difficult task that had been set, celebrated the last exam with, etc.

I certainly don't know the year for everyone. Students I mostly saw at parties, who studied different subjects (or went to different universities, for it was London) could easily be my year ±3 or more.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#102

Post by Tade0 »

mrweasel wrote: post #86
dragonwriter wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone with a birth day after the transition day will become two years younger when the change goes into effect, assuming the article’s description is correct (which it may not be.) Under the old system you were one year old at birth, and a year older at the beginning of the next year (not, as one might expect, at their next birth day.) That means at the beginning of the year on which under the more common system one…

Hold up... I don't mean to be critical of another countrys traditions and ways of counting, but WAT!. If you're born on say December 31st, then the very next day you're considered to be two years old? I can't imaging that it's particular practical to think of some one who has only been alive for a few days as being two years old. It's not even useful if you think of it as the child being "in their second year". Techn…

> Technically true, but what are you trying to convey?

The number of winters you survived probably.

Folk descriptions of age in my corner of the world often used springs as a unit - to this day the plural form for years in my language(Polish) reads as "summers".

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#103

Post by simias »

mrweasel wrote: post #86
dragonwriter wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone with a birth day after the transition day will become two years younger when the change goes into effect, assuming the article’s description is correct (which it may not be.) Under the old system you were one year old at birth, and a year older at the beginning of the next year (not, as one might expect, at their next birth day.) That means at the beginning of the year on which under the more common system one…

Hold up... I don't mean to be critical of another countrys traditions and ways of counting, but WAT!. If you're born on say December 31st, then the very next day you're considered to be two years old? I can't imaging that it's particular practical to think of some one who has only been alive for a few days as being two years old. It's not even useful if you think of it as the child being "in their second year". Techn…

I think I can imagine how such a system came out to be, until fairly recently keeping accurate timekeeping and even datekeeping might have been difficult, especially for isolated people. You may not have known the exact date of one's birth, but you know that it was "3 winters ago" or somesuch. You wouldn't know the precise day of one's birth, but you'd know the year and use that instead.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#104

Post by zarzavat »

maxerickson wrote: post #31
namro wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the first century in the Current Era would be 99 years? There's no year 0. A century is any quantity of 100, go crazier: 1946 to 2045!!!

We can include a year called 0 in the first century, no problem. All we have to do to get a year 0 is decide that there was one.

For that matter let’s get rid of the asinine BC system and just use negative years AD.

The thing that gets me is that when they invented the CE notation, they went to the trouble of inventing a “BCE” notation for BC. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!

Also while we are fixing broken modular arithmetic, let’s add a proper modulo division operator to all the languages that got % wrong :)

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#105

Post by Symbiote »

mrweasel wrote: post #95
enkid wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their concept of a "two year old" is completely different from our concept. So though the words may translate the same, it's just a different definition. For them, it's equally weird to think that a child would go through a year of life being "0 years old."

It just seems like they still used the age for things like: When do you start school, when can you vote, drink and so on, all of which in my mind has always been linked to some expectation of maturity (justified or not). If school starts a six, then some of those children could be one to two years younger than others. For adult either way seems fine, there's little difference between 35 and 37, but for the youngest c…

Under the old system, the oldest person "age 6" is still 365 days older than the youngest.

An infant born on 2022-01-01 is currently "2", the same "age" as a baby born on 2022-12-31.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#106

Post by simias »

Tade0 wrote: post #102
mrweasel wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold up... I don't mean to be critical of another countrys traditions and ways of counting, but WAT!. If you're born on say December 31st, then the very next day you're considered to be two years old? I can't imaging that it's particular practical to think of some one who has only been alive for a few days as being two years old. It's not even useful if you think of it as the child being "in their second year". Techn…

> Technically true, but what are you trying to convey? The number of winters you survived probably. Folk descriptions of age in my corner of the world often used springs as a unit - to this day the plural form for years in my language(Polish) reads as "summers".

Ditto in Russian, and in French "spring" is sometimes used as a synonymous for "year" when talking about ages, especially in more poetic contexts.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#107

Post by TheCoelacanth »

mrweasel wrote: post #95
enkid wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their concept of a "two year old" is completely different from our concept. So though the words may translate the same, it's just a different definition. For them, it's equally weird to think that a child would go through a year of life being "0 years old."

It just seems like they still used the age for things like: When do you start school, when can you vote, drink and so on, all of which in my mind has always been linked to some expectation of maturity (justified or not). If school starts a six, then some of those children could be one to two years younger than others. For adult either way seems fine, there's little difference between 35 and 37, but for the youngest c…

The children will all still be within one year of each other, they're just making the cutoff for each year-long age cohort December 31 instead of some date in August or September like they would in the US. In practice, it makes little difference.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#108

Post by Y_Y »

nine_k wrote: post #96
fosk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lua is the “last standing man” now.

Every language for scientific computation uses 1-based indexes, to follow the tradition of using them in formulas. FORTRAN, APL, Julia, R, MATLAB, GNU Octane, etc. I remember that (some versions of) BASIC back in the day had an option to switch between 1-based and 0-based indexing, to appeal to both Fortran and C folks.

In physics, relativists usually count from 0. Furthermore on the numerical side, C is at least as popular as Fortran.

Julia lets you switch the index base too.

Finally a special mention for Mathematica, which appears to be 1-based, but in fact is a thinly disguised 0-based lisp, {a,b} is just List[a,b] is really just (List a b) so of course if you want b you ask for element 2, element 0 is the head and is just List.

Re: South Korea adopts new law to join the international standard of age counting

#109

Post by Symbiote »

bitcurious wrote: post #82
skissane wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alternative take: the US customary units have stuck around because SI has failed to present itself as better enough to switch. The thing that doesn't make sense about this argument – the US and the UK are the only major economies which haven't adopted metric for 90%+ of use cases. (Everywhere retains non-metric units in certain exceptional cases – e.g. most countries use feet for altitude in aviation, although that…

To play along with the argument, prior to the metric system, units were very local. So it’s not like China and Ghana and Russia and France were all using inches and feet and cups and pints, rather they were all using their own little units of measure, which on the whole turned out to be less convenient than the metric system. The UK and US happened to be (mostly) aligned on a more convenient system that could outcomp…

Remember the British system is called "Imperial Units" -- these were used for a huge chunk of the world! Everywhere except Britain has switched, and Britain was in the process of changing to metric when it became one of the first media-pushed us-vs-them political issues.

Close to all trade, construction, design, healthcare etc in Britain is done in metric units.

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