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Let's stop counting centuries

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Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#151

Post by mixmastamyk »

Dalewyn wrote: post #139
mixmastamyk wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appeal to ignorance and anti-intellectualism, congrats.

Let me put it this way: Can you really blame someone for not knowing a historical fact that is completely irrelevant to their life, especially when they probably have more pressing concerns to learn and care about? We only have so many hours in a day and so many days in a lifetime, while knowledge is practically infinite.

You could say that about anything.

I limited my initial statement to educated folks, and presumably those who would like to be one.

/history/democracy/milestones -> relatively important.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#152

Post by antonvs »

pdonis wrote: post #122
lupire wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first day of the 1st Century is Jan 1, 1 AD. The point is that some days got skipped over the centuries, but there's no need to make the Centuries have weird boundaries.

> The first day of the 1st Century is Jan 1, 1 AD. That's not what the poster I originally responded to is saying. He's saying the 1st Century should start on a nonexistent day.

You can make this work by having the 1st century start on the last day of 1 BC. Think of it as an overlap if you like; it doesn't really matter.

That allows for consistent zero-indexed centuries. It doesn't have any other practical consequences that matter.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#153

Post by mixmastamyk »

kergonath wrote: post #107
mixmastamyk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America was a backwater at the time and therefore the best place to experiment with European enlightenment ideals. Which it did, and was a direct factor in the French Revolution. I also learned about numerous revolutions in Latin America from Mexico to Bolivar to San Martin over the early 1800s. The events that directly affect the modern world should be covered in school. I’d say revolutions that created large modern…

> I’d say revolutions that created large modern states would be among them. The Russian revolution as well. And the Chinese one. It’s quite difficult to make sense of the late 20th century (yes, I know) without them. Or the early 21th.

Agreed, and it doesn't mean memorizing a date as folks here keep mentioning. The nearest decade is fine in most cases.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#154

Post by samatman »

Technically, decades and centuries start in a January with one or two zeros at the end, respectively. So the 1700s and the 18th century are exactly the same interval of time.

ISO 8601-2:

> Decade: A string consisting of three digits represents a decade, for example “the 1960s”. It is the ten-year time interval of those years where the three specified digits are the first three digits of the year.

> Century: Two digits may be used to indicate the century which is the hundred year time interval consisting of years beginning with those two digits.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#155

Post by chefandy »

jhbadger wrote: post #134
arp242 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like "17th century", "1600s", or "1990s" are rarely exact dates, and almost always fuzzy. It really doesn't matter what the exact start and end day is. If you need exact dates then use exact dates. A calendar change like this is a non-starter. A lot of disruption for no real purpose other than pleasing some pedantics.

Exactly. Historians often talk about things like "the long 18th century" running from 1688 (Britian's "Glorious Revolution") to 1815 (the defeat of Napoleon) because it makes sense culturally to have periods that don't exactly fit 100-year chunks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_eighteenth_century

I thought the article was going to argue against chunking ideas into centuries because it's an arbitrary, artificial construct superimposed on fluid human culture. I could get behind that, generally, while acknowledging that many academic pursuits need arbitrary bins other people understand for context. I did not expect to see arguments for stamping out the ambiguities in labellibg these arbitrary time chunks. Nerdy pub trivia aside, I don't see the utility of instantly recalling the absolute timeline of the American revotion in relation to the enlightenment. The 'why's— the relationships among the ideas— hold the answers. The 'when's just help with context. To my eye, the century count labels suit their purpose for colloquial usage and the precise years work fine for more specific things. Not everything has to be good at everything to be useful enough for something.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#156

Post by antonvs »

Terretta wrote: post #117
kdmccormick wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? 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.

> nobody says "21st year" either On the contrary, enough people say it, it's a quora question: https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-mean-to-be-in-your-twenty... Authors love phrases like this. Which, in turn, comes from another ordinal/cardinal confusion stemming back to common law: "A person who has completed the eighteenth year of age has reached majority; below this age, a person is a minor." That means they complet…

The top response in your Quora link is that your 21st year "means you’re 20. You have had your 20th birthday, but not yet your 21st." That is the conventional definition.

People commonly make the mistake of thinking otherwise, but that's all it is. A mistake.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#157

Post by antonvs »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #137
IshKebab wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the Romans had an excuse for that mistake. Not sure about Lua.

I 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.

It'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.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#158

Post by bregma »

Terretta wrote: post #117
kdmccormick wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? 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.

> nobody says "21st year" either On the contrary, enough people say it, it's a quora question: https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-mean-to-be-in-your-twenty... Authors love phrases like this. Which, in turn, comes from another ordinal/cardinal confusion stemming back to common law: "A person who has completed the eighteenth year of age has reached majority; below this age, a person is a minor." That means they complet…

It's just not true. You've completed being 17 years old on your 18th birthday, when you enter your 19th year and can count 18 years under your belt.

Consider a newborn. As soon as they're squeezed out they are in their first year of life. That continues until the first anniversary of their decanting, at which point they are one year old and enter their second year of life.

There is nobody, nobody, who refers to a baby as being in their zeroth year of life. Nor would they refer to a one-year-old as still being in their first year of life as if they failed a grade and are being held back.

The pattern continues for other countable things. Breakfast is not widely considered the zeroth meal of the day. Neil Armstrong has never been considered the zeroth man on the moon nor is Buzz Aldrin the first. The gold medal in the Olympics is not awarded for coming in zeroth place.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#159

Post by samatman »

layer8 wrote: post #128
furyofantares wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On 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.

birthday != date of birth “Birthday” really means “anniversary of the date of birth”.

Spanish has us beat on this one: cumpleaños, "completed year" basically.
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