Starting from zero
Is it possible to write a doctoral thesis without being able to grasp simple, basic concepts and when one is partially innumerate?
Apparently so, because Doctor-Joseph-Muscat, who has taken over in Super One’s tripartite name stakes from Doctor-Alfred-Sant, has had published in yesterday’s The Times a ‘talking point’ article called A New Decade Has Dawned.
The only talking point about it is the fact that the would-be prime minister believes that 10 is the first number of a decade rather than the last. He will argue, no doubt, that it all depends on where you begin counting, but then he is probably one of those who believes that 2000 was the first year of a new millennium rather than the last year of the old one. Presumably, when asked by, for example, a supermarket assistant to count out 10 euros, he counts from one to 10 and not from nought to nine. But quite frankly, one never knows.
The deteriorating quality of Labour leaders is a source of amusement until general election day draws closer, and then it becomes cause for concern. Here is a man who is unable to fully understand the concept of nought, yet who presumes to hector the finance minister about the national budget. I don’t know what you think about it, but a man who counts to 10 by starting from nought and ending with nine inspires me with something less than confidence in his ability to run the country.
Joseph Muscat worked for a brief spell as an investment adviser. I shudder to think of the sort of investment advice he dispensed.
They’re giving away PhDs rather cheaply these days, it seems.
*******
More than 30 per cent of births in Malta are now to unmarried women or to women who are married to somebody other than the baby’s father, so it was particularly symbolic, I suppose, that the first birth of the new year, habitually featured in the news media, was to a young, unmarried woman. The father was present and proud – but still, you get the picture.
This is how it is now. The gulf between real life and political talk about traditional Maltese family values grows wider every day.
The family values are there, for what they are worth, but tradition has long since flown out of the window.
*********
Only two babies were born on New Year’s Day. That’s another indication of the way things are going, even if we didn’t have the low birth rate statistics to tell us. How long before there are no New Year babies at all for that standard ‘dullest news day of the year’ filler?
It won’t be long now before the New Year’s Day babies filmed and photographed by the media are the sort who greatly upset Norman Lowell and his followers, on the one side of the spectrum, and ultra-conservative Catholics on the other.
**********
The Christmas whirligig befuddles the mind. Parliamentary secretary Joe Cassar congratulated the new parents and told them that their children will be the youngest of the class.
Reporters dutifully took this down and reported it back to us. But of course, under the current system which has been in place for years, children born on 1 January are the oldest in the class, while children born on 31 December are the youngest.
The ad hoc system used by church schools in the days when I went to school has long since been dispatched to the afterlife, and it didn’t guarantee that January babies were the youngest in the class, anyway. The youngest girl in my glass was born in May.
I trust Joe Cassar doesn’t think, too, that this is the first year of the new decade, for then I shall truly abandon all hope.
NOTE: Joe Cassar told me this morning that he was quoted badly. The mothers he visited included one who gave birth on the last day of the year as well as those on the first day of the year. He joked with the mother of the New Year’s Eve baby that hers would be the youngest in class. The reporter got his babies confused.
******
The sort of Christmas spirit that comes in a bottle, coupled with a surfeit of gatherings, escalates the risk of tactless remarks and words let slip that cause offence and provoke feuds among those primed already for combustion.
It doesn’t help that some people seem unable to understand just how much the choice of a single word or the phrasing of a sentence can give away about their true feelings or opinions, even if they are trying to keep these concealed.
And so it was with Kurt Sansone in The Times, who described the custom of the president exchanging New Year greetings with dignitaries at his palace as a “chore”.
Worse still, he put this word in a former president’s mouth, even though I am quite sure that Ugo Mifsud Bonnici would never have called the exchange of greetings by that name – a duty at most, a chore never. “Shaking Dr Abela’s hand at the traditional New Year’s greetings at the palace in Valletta yesterday,” Sansone wrote, “President Emeritus Ugo Mifsud Bonnici started the discussion, recalling how he had gone through the chores of the New Year’s greetings every year since 1966.”
Washing the floor is a chore. Doing the laundry is another. Going to the palace for a glass of champagne and a few civil words is not in the same category as doing the dishes. A former president would have to be boorish indeed to describe it as such, and any reporter who does so lacks manners, a dictionary or both.
This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.
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Actually there were 11 births in that day..wishing you a good year
The noise you hear is the sound of barrel bottoms being scraped. Surely you can do better than that?
Different views
http://forum.dvdtalk.com/other-talk/566412-when-does-new-decade-begin.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100101/ap_on_re_us/us_new_year
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100101/wl_uk_afp/usattacksnewyearbritainnigeriayemen
[Daphne – There are no different views in mathematics. There are only numbers.]
True, very true.
But this is NOT mathematics – it is culture and perception.
Just as (for example) 1960 was part of the sixties and 1970 was part of the seventies, so 2010 will be considered as the first year of whatever name will be coined for the second decade of the third millenium.
At least for 99.9% of the people, it will.
I thought this argument had been exhaustively thrashed-out nine years ago.
Twannie – You’re right, it WAS exhaustively thrashed out nine years ago. That’s when many people realised that 2000 started in January but ended 12 months later in December – so December is when the 20th century came to an end. The 21st started on 1 January 2001.
But then of course, the 90s ended in 1999 and the Noughties started in 2000, which is a non-mathematical way of describing decades. Muscat, clearly, is counting in this mode, but forgot all about Daphne’s straws and failed to qualify it.
In all probability, Dr Ugo Mifsud Bonnici was speaking in Maltese so he wouldn’t have said “chores”.
which makes it even more unlikely that Dr Ugo referred to a ‘facenda’, though ‘qadi ta’ dmir’ could have been confused with a ‘qadja’.
“Qadja” is an errand, not a chore.
It isn’t really about counting numbers… it’s more about how we talk about past decades. We refer to the sixties, the seventies… 1960 and 1970 doubtlessly included. 2000 is also included when we talk about the noughties. I would let Joseph Muscat off the hook with this one – the way I see it, we have just started the tennies! Or whatever name they’ll call the next ten years.
I don’t care if you publish this or not… just wanted to tell you. I’m not crazy about about using my real identity.
Thanks
Daphne, it seems you did not think this this article out through fully before putting it online.
In the paragraphs below you will find the reasons why I think so.
Decades are groups of ten whole years. If you count the number of whole years between midnight of the 1st of January 2000 and midnight of the 31st of December 2009 you will find ten whole years. If you had to consider – as you are implying – that the year 2010-2011 is the last year of the decade then the decade starting on the 1st of January 2000 and ending, as you say, on the 31st December 2010 would have eleven whole years.
[Daphne – I see what you’re saying, but I guess maybe our brains don’t work the same way. When I count calendar years, I start counting at the beginning of the calendar, not at some random point of my choosing. So when I begin sorting out time into decades, guess what? I start with In The Year Of Our Lord 1. That will give me – and should give you – decades AD1 to 10, 11 to 20, 21 to 30 – you get the picture. Given that this year is 2010, it should be bloody easy to work out that 10 is – bingo! – the last year of the decade and not the first, but there’s no accounting for labyrinthine thinking, I suppose.]
The same logic applies when one counts centuries. The last year of the hundred – year packet of whole years referred to as last century was the 1999 – 2000 year. That is why it is commonly said that we are in the twenty-first century even though only one decade of the twenty-first-century has so far elapsed.
The same applies for millennia. This is the third millennium, even if we are in 2010.
The error you have committed is precisely assuming that one begins to count at ‘one’. People tend to count only when there is ‘something’ to count, therefore, there is always a ‘one’.
[Daphne – No, you are the one making a fundamental error. You are confusing a year which is numbered at its conclusion – like a birthday – with a year that is numbered at its start and for its entire duration, like the years of the Christian calendar. Unlike birthdays (I am 45 years old but in my 46th year), the number given to the calendar year is the one we are actually in. Hence, the year is 2010 and we are in the 2010th year after Christ, not the 2011th year. Knowing what Anno Domini means would have helped you with that one. AD1: In The Year Of Our Lord 1, which is why AD goes before the year and not after it like BC. He was born, and they began counting: the first year after his birth, AD1. The 2nd year after his birth, AD2. There was no AD0. Nought was the point of birth.]
This leads to a very ubiquitous misconception that ‘zero’ is either not there or substantively different from the other numbers. In fact, it is neither the former nor the latter. It is a very real number just like the others. The only particularity of ‘zero’ is that it straddles the point between the positive scale and the negative scale. And precisely because because of this that it is always the first digit of both the positive and the negative scale and that one always (even if he or she may not realize it) begins to count from ‘zero’.
When counting apples, the first apple you point towards is nominated as ‘one’, the consecutive / cumulative nature of numbers requires that the very nomination of ‘one’ depends on a ‘zero’ to begin with, in just the same way as you need to go past ‘six’ in order to reach ‘seven’.
[Daphne – Nought was the point of Christ’s birth. The mistake you are making here is in overlooking the fact that Year 1 was called Year 1 while it was ongoing, and not at its conclusion, like a birthday. The 2010th year after Christ will not be concluded until 31 December this year. It was not concluded last week. Those who celebrated 2000 years of Christianity on 1 January 2000 were a whole year too early.]
Also, if you have a basket that can hold only ten apples – lets call this basket a decade – and you have eleven apples, the eleventh apple has to go in the second basket, hence, in the second decade.
The same applies – perhaps more clearly – when discounting (counting, in the other direction) apples. If cou discount one apple from a basket containing only one apple, you end up with zero apples, not with minus one apple.
In fact, contrary to your idea, the first number in the numeric system is always ‘zero’, and in counting or discounting the other numbers must always lead away from zero in the case of counting on a positive scale and towards zero in the case of discounting on a positive scale.
The real-life examples of the foregoing are many. When you measure a piece of paper with a ruler, for example, you position the edge of the paper on the ‘zero’ mark on the ruler and not on the ‘one’. The exact point at which an earthquake takes place is ground ‘zero’, and kilometres are counted from that point in order to determine the distance from ground-zero. Pilots’ altimetres count the metres from the ‘zero’ metre level i.e. the surface, Rockets launch at the t=’zero’ mark, and at the supermarket, if you only have 10 euros and you pay 10 euros, you will have 0 euros left in your wallet.
Also, on your abacus above, if you want to count 5 units, you have to start with ‘zero’ units on your row.
Finally, the representation of fractions of whole numbers expressed in a decimal format is very indivative: The representation of ‘0.5’ means five-tenths of a whole beginning from zero.
To conclude: this is in fact, the second decade of the twenty-first century. This second decade has started three days ago and therefore it is indeed a new decade. Also, although they may not realize, people always count from zero.
[Daphne – No, really, you’ve got this wrong. Your reasoning is correct but erroneously applied to calendar years. And do please spare me the patronising lectures, because I’m actually pretty good with numbers – one of those supremely irritating people who can convert large sums from one currency to another without using a calculator or even a piece of paper, for instance. I do it for sport.]
Sweet Jesus. Martin give us a break, You ‘re going on and on; A lot of us have a life and most of us are still in the process of getting over huge hangovers, swine flu, indigestions and painful overdrafts. So I don’t really think we give a flying f=== whether we started a decade or ended one. Joey’s article lacked insight and vision, which means he started HIS decade on the wrong foot……………..again.
To you and all I wish you health. Forget prosperity. It ain’t gonna happen just yet.
Go get’im girl, you’re right on.
..and gonzi is any better? they couldn’t even count the numbers when the oil was at its lowest to buy in stock. Being a speculator is not their strong points for sure.
~10 births per day = c. 3600 births per year.
We’re hardly witnessing the extinction of the Maltese.
I read in the Malta Today paper this morning (and I generally trust that paper) that Dr Joseph Muscat is getting cold feet where censorship is concerned. It seems that although young MP Owen Bonnici , who was sure to get my vote (ok, I vote Labour, but that’s my business) is trying hard to get censorship abolished, the wotsit of progress and change is sitting on fences. It would be a real pity if this story were confirmed to be true, especially when I remember Dr Muscat clearly say to Gonzi in a political meeting, when the STITCHING story broke out that the times for censoring plays is over. I hope that Dr Muscat is not considering his position now . . . I hope that he does really believe that the removal of censorship is right and that it doesn’t get shelved because of some vote grabbing propoganda.
I know I keep promising not to post on censorship but what can I do, It’s what makes me tick, so please forgive me. But I would be very disappointed if such an important political persona pussied out of a fight really worth fighting for the sake of votes.
I don’t like that kind of leader.
Adrian, the little twerp doesn’t take positions. He’s a waffling opportunist. Always has been, always will be. Woe is us if enough airheads put him in.
Is nought (zero) counted or not? That’s a moot point. I would say: it depends. Regarding the start of the new millennium, there have been arguments for and against starting from the year 2000. When we say that we’ve started the 21st century, isn’t it because we’ve changed the first 2 digits from 19 to 20? Others argued in favour of starting from 2001 as being the first year of the new century, reasoning (equally correct, I would say) that one counts from 1 (in this case, to 100). I would say that the first day of the new millennium was 1 January 2000, which means that on 1 January 2001 we completed the 1st year of the new millennium. Thus, on the 1st January 2010 we completed the first decade of the millennium, and have started the second decade.
You are right about the decades thing (and Doktor Joey was wrong!) but the year 2000 was indeed the first year of the new millennium.
[Daphne – U jahasra, as they say in Eastenders, you lot are doing my head in. This is a simple matter of counting. You can’t argue with numbers and you can’t say that I am right about decades but wrong about the millennium, because the same system of counting applies to both. So here we go again. Nought = the point of Christ’s birth. The year that followed his birth was AD1. AD1 was concluded 12 months (the calendar was different, but for argument’s sake I’ll use the calendar reckoning we use now) after Christ’s birth (nought). Therefore AD1 was known as AD1 right through from its start to its conclusion. AD1 was not called AD1 at its conclusion. Much of the confusion – the Labour leader’s too, I would suspect – arises from the way we reckon up our own age. While we are 40 years old, we are in our 41st year. But a calendar year is not a birthday. The year 2010 is the 2010th year and not the 2011th. The first millennium was AD1 to AD1000. The second millennium was AD1001 to AD2000. The third millennium (this one) is AD2001 to AD3000. It’s the same with decades. The first decade was AD1 to AD10, so it stands to reason that the first decade of this millennium is AD2001 to AD2010. In other words, we are in the last year of the first decade of this millennium. But the number ’10’ should have screamed that out, shouldn’t it?]
Here:
http://img121.imageshack.us/img121/6149/mill.jpg
“How’s your granddaughter, by the way?”
“Huh? She’s fine. What’s that have to do with anything?”
“How old is she, Herb? Haven’t seen her in a while.”
“Seven months. Now, as to the way mathematicians count. . .”
“Ah, not quite a year old,” I said. “But she’s not zero-something, is she?”
“What? Of course she’s not. Stop being silly. Now if we can get back to. .
“But I thought you mathematicians started counting with one?”
“Not for things like ages. Just for centuries,” he said.
@Lino Cert…. Have you been reading too much of Saviour Balzan lately?
Enid Blyton, perhaps, Herb?
Arthur C Clarke had made an analogy of this once. If your grocer started your scale on 1, instead of 0, would you be OK when your 9kg of tea had the price of 10kg?
Saying that, I think it was a mistake to count the year from 1, rather than having the presumed birth of Christ as year 0, as the year ending in a zero would be more natural to consider the first year of a decade/century/millennium. It’s a more natural approach. It has the horrendous outcome that the first millennium only had 999 years, something which historians might find awkward, but nearly everyone else can live with.
[Daphne – Pat, you shock me. I thought people who work in IT….never mind. I’ve just been through this via email with a friend in Gozo. Nought is precisely that: nought, nothing, zero. One year is clearly not nought, but something – in this case, a unit called a year. So the first year after Christ could not be Year Nought because that would have been an oxymoron. If it is a year, then it cannot be nought. And that’s why nought starts with his birth, or rather just before his birth – because before that there was ‘nought’ – in other words, no Christ, and then there was Christ. This is a very basic concept. It’s not about what we call the year, but about calculating and counting and the concept of nought. The mistake we make sometimes is to think of nought as a number. It isn’t. It is a concept, the concept of nothing. First there is nothing, and then there is something: 1, 2, 3.]
@Pat,
It’s the c# habit my friend, I actually start counting from 0 too without realising it!
Actually there is no 0 year. The year before 1 AD is 1BC. This is mathematically wrong but historically that is how it is known.
[Daphne – It is not mathematically wrong, but mathematically correct. The meaning of zero/nought is ‘nothing’. By definition, a year is a unit and not nothing, so there cannot be a Year Zero. Zero/nought is the point at which you begin counting: Christ’s birth. You count the years backwards or forwards from that point zero.]
A monk in 525AD came up with the Anno Domini system in order to calculate Easter dates. Bede, an English scholar who lived in the 3rd century, was the first to use the notion of BC and in his calculation did not use year 0.
Most probably Bede did this because the Romans had no symbol for zero. The symbol for zero is an Arabic numeral and only entered Europe in the 11th century.
Also we should keep in mind that the modern calendar started being used centuries after the birth of Christ and was subsequently revised by Pope Gregory.
Daphne:
I’m very well aware of the mathematical implications and precision. In fact in my work I have to be meticulous in these matters. A single character wrong would throw an error and to not separate zero from one could be multiplied into disasters. It gets even worse when you realise that the concept of “zero” is very different from the concept of “nothing” (or null), which is why even your assessment is pedantically incorrect (zero and nothing are two different things), while still making sense semantically.
That said, even an engineer would realise that while there is an inescapable need to always be precise in his work when it comes to social interaction we can’t get away from the fact that as a species we make constant estimations to get by and the kind of precision use in engineering, construction, physics or programming is not necessary on a day-to-day basis.
What Pat means is that they actually started counting from AD1 rather than zero. So when Christ was 2 years old it must have already been AD3, and if he died at age 33, then it must have been AD34… but that is another issue.
So let’s do it in steps…
0-1
1-2
2-3
3-4
4-5
5-6
6-7
7-8
8-9
9-10
Well, the immortal Douglas Adams highlights the point a bit sarcastically:
http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/pedants.html
[Daphne – Be grateful to pedants every time you drive a car, fly in a plane, or use your computer. Without pedants and their precision with numbers, you’d be dead or bored. You call it pedantry; I call it precision and accuracy.]
Irrespective of when a decade starts, the most revealing fact in that rhetoric laden PL vision is the complete absence of reference to Malta in the EU!
@Mr Micallef.
Joey is under stress miskin. Apparently Iceland got the wrong advice so they want their money back from the consultant.
Probably so! Rumours have it that it is precisely because he needs to refund the “consultancy” money that he is on a crusade to recover the VAT he paid on his Alfa!
This argument reminds me of when I found an antique coin once upon a time…
It had 500 B.C. engraved on it………..
Unfortunately it is another common misconception that Jesus was born on AD 1. Although tradition would not have us believe otherwise, the learned know that scholars came up with the idea that Jesus was born on AD 1 long after Jesus was actually born. Sometime during the middle ‘dark’ ages. In fact mainstream academic opinion seems to hold that Jesus was born a few years before AD 1.
Because of the confusion as to when Christ was actually born, it has become customary to round off decades at the 10th interval ‘as if’ Christ was indeed born on year AD 0 or rather AD 1 – 1. The examples are many and they come from none other than the God’s own emissary on Earth.
[Daphne – Martin, nobody except fundamentalist Christians – of which, I admit, there are many – believes that Christ was actually born at the time our calendar begins, still less that his birthday was 25 December. But as a starting-point for the calendar that we are long accustomed to using, we accept it. It would be another sort of fundamentalism to start a war attempting to change the calendar on the grounds that hey, Christ wasn’t really born then, was he?
And please, please, please, read back through these comments. Christ could not have been born in Year O because if it is a year then it is a unit of one, and not zero. Zero is not the year but the point of his birth, when the calendar begins.]
In fact, the Catholic Church celebrated the Great Jubilee – 2000 years of living under the guidance of Christ’s own teaching – in the twelve days spanning the period between the 24th of December 1999 and the 6th of January 2000. By your logic, the Church should have celebrated this achievement in 2001 not in 2000.
[Daphne – That’s right, they should have done. And it’s not MT logic. It’s simple counting. As somebody else ‘spelled’ it out here, graphically and simply: 0 to 1, 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, 4 to 5, 5 to 6, 6 to 7, 7 to 8, 8 to 9, 9 to 10: count them, and you’ll see that you have 10 units there, not 11 or 9. I’m actually quite disturbed at how apparently difficult this is to understand.]
Also, last November, the Time magazine bid goodbye to the ‘Decade from Hell’.
[Daphne – I imagine that Time magazine worked on the basis of the ‘cultural’ decade, like the 60s and the 70s, and not the chronological decade. But somebody in their office must have been awake to the sheer stupidity of starting a decade, rather than ending it, with the very explicit number 10. Wars must have been fought over the water-cooler. The trouble is that when you’ve committed yourself to seeing 2000 as the start of the millennium rather than the end of one, then you’re screwed for life, unless you have to guts to admit your mistake. 2000 was just a landmark number (that’s how I celebrated it) and not the start of anything except year-dates beginning with 2 instead of 1. I suggest you try paying a 10 euro bill with nine euros and see what happens.]
In fact there are many other examples and there seems to be a broad worldwide consensus that we are in the second decade of the third millennium.
To tie this to what I have said in my previous post, all scales begin at 0. Those scales that for some historical quirk seem to begin at some other point are always made, in time and by matter of conventional use, to begin at 0. The calendar is no exception.
To conclude, I do see your logic. However, I still cannot say that I think that you are technically right because your logic is based on the probably wrong assumption that Christ was actually born on AD1. Also, in discussing a socially constructed concept (as opposed to a naturally given concept) like the calendar, there is no such thing as being ‘technically right’ when you are in a minority.
[Daphne – No, I not assuming Christ was born in AD1. I hope he was born at all. The point at which it is assumed he was born – nought – is used as the defining point of our calendar, so that we count the years back and forward from that point. Whether it is true he was born then is irrelevant. It is not even relevant whether he existed at all. Nor is it relevant that time is a socially constructed concept. We are simply discussing whether a group of 2000 units that begins with the unit 0 to 1 ends at 1999 or 2000. Quite clearly and irrefutably, it ends at the final point of 2000. It is quite possible to be in a minority and right, and to be with the majority and horribly wrong, Martin. Look to history for very many examples of this.]
But a “socially constructed concept” is precisely what we are discussing here, not a mathematical one.
[Daphne – SIGH. The idea of time counted from the year of Christ’s birth is a social/cultural construct. But the actual counting is mathematical.]
The counting, yes – but not the name given to decades and when they start and finish. That is purely arbitrary and a “social construct”.
I think this is one case where you should adopt the old “holes and digging” adage.
[Daphne – Not at all. I’m enjoying it. It’s fascinating to see just how many people don’t understand what zero is. No wonder the maths failure rate is so high.]
It will be a sad day indeed when we need a calculator to decide whether Joseph Muscat is a twat.
Kif hawwadtli il-wires, Martin dear!
One point which proves your logic and has not been mentioned is that we add one day every four (leap year) to make up for the lost time during the previous four but then skip the extra day every hundredth so as to adjust the extra minutes accumulated during the previous century.
In this manner the only instant that space time and earth time are exact is 23:59:59 on the 31st of December of every century. It is therefore obvious that the century ends on the calendar year ending in ’00’.
The Times also said this week that after a traffic accident, a car was a “right off”…..LOL
Daphne what you are referring to is not basic Maths, but the Gregorian Calendar! Under this system, year 1 BC is followed by AD 1. Year 0 is skipped altogether. In Maths this is a big foul and if we were to stick to Maths, 0 IS a number and it is wrong to skip number 0! In fact Astronomical year numbering corrected this and considered year -1 BC as Year 0.
[Daphne – Madonna santa Gesu hanin, it IS maths. And it is in maths that you will find your explanation as to why there is no Year 0. There cannot, by definition, be a Year 0 because a year is a unit and not nought. Zero is not a number. It is the ABSENCE of countable units. If there is a year, then it is just that, a year – one unit, or the parts thereof – and not zero/nought.]
All scales start from 0 and time is no exception. It would be wrong to assume there was year -1 and then suddenly we skip year 0 to go to year 1.
[Daphne – The fundamental mistake that you and others are making is just this: thinking of the years BC as ‘minus’. The years BC are not ‘minus’ – or below zero. They are a continuum: in other words, plus, and not minus. Just as you cannot have Year 0 – a year which is a unit but which strangely enough doesn’t exist even though you are living in it and it is recorded time – so you blatantly obviously cannot have a ‘minus year’ – a year which has inadvertently gone missing, even though people lived in it and it was recorded time. The fact that the years BC are counted backwards does not make them minus years or years below zero. They are counted backwards because they are counted from the point of Christ’s birth, so it stands to reason that it would be impossible to count them forwards.]
In computer programming the most common mistake one can do is to forget the number 0! For example arrays usually start counting from 0 and 0 is an addressable space. Creating an array of 60 and trying to address cell 60
will result in and Out of Range Exception!
[Daphne – At the risk of driving myself and everyone else crazy through repetition, zero is not a number but the absence of countable units. By thinking of it as a number, you have arrested your ability to understand certain basic concepts, like the fact that you cannot have a Year 0 because if it is a year then by definition it is a unit. There are 10 chairs around the table at which I now sit. They are counted 1 to 10 and not 0 to nine. Any attempt at sitting on Chair Zero would result in a tumble and somebody having to haul me up off the floor.]
Seconds, minutes, hours all start counting from 0. Take for example 1 minute. It consists of 60 seconds or 0 to 59 seconds.
[Daphne – I can’t blame the education system because I went to a crap school and still it didn’t affect my ability to work things out. But we really need to find somebody to blame for the fact that there are people around who actually believe that a minute consists of 60 seconds which are counted from zero to 59. Words absolutely, utterly, almost fail me. You really, much to my horror, cannot understand what zero is. Zero is nothing, literally. One second is one unit of time. You start counting that second at point zero but when it is completed it is one unit. Zero is the point at which counting starts. You cannot have a unit zero because that is an oxymoron. It is either a unit or it is zero.]
1 minute = 0 —-> 59 seconds
1 hour = 0 —-> 59 minutes
1 millenium = 0 —–> 999 years
So year 1000 would be the start of the new millenium, not the end!
[Daphne – No. Ring your old maths teacher and after giving him or her a ruddy bollocking for letting you down, ask for an explanation. If you don’t believe me, perhaps you will believe him/her. And if there is a maths teacher out there – the official voice of authority, unlike mine – please weigh in here because I never thought I would be teaching simple mathematical concepts via a blog at the age of 45.]
Astronomical year numbering is more accurate but not widely used because we got so much used to the Gregorian and the preceeding Julian calendar.
Going back to computer programming, XML does not allow year 0 in its built-in datatype primitives. However, the defining recommendation indicates a change to a system similar to ISO 8601 and astronomical year numbering is likely in the future. [XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes (2nd ed.). World Wide Web Consortium.]
YES, I do love programming! Sorry Daphne imma kwazi bdejt nisthi flokok meta qrajt l-artiklu :s
[Daphne – You’re the one who should be embarrassed, I’m afraid, in your conviction that counting starts at zero, and that 60 seconds are numbered 0 to 59. It’s quite frightening, actually.]
X’pacenzja irid ikollok ma certa nies Madonna santa Gesu hanin. I’m basing my reasoning on facts. Now explain THIS:
Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_year_numbering
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.
A zero year was first used by the eighteenth century French astronomers Philippe de La Hire (1702) and Jacques Cassini (1740). However, both of these astronomers used the applicable AD/BC designations of Latin and French with their year zero, thus near the epoch the years were designated 2 BC, 1 BC, 0, 1 AD, 2 AD, etc. They did not use −/0/+. During the nineteenth century, astronomers designated years with either BC/0/AD or −/0/+. Astronomers did not exclusively use the −/0/+ system until the mid twentieth century.
Cassini gave the following reasons for using a year 0:[5]
The year 0 is that in which one supposes that Jesus Christ was born, which several chronologists mark 1 before the birth of Jesus Christ and which we marked 0, so that the sum of the years before and after Jesus Christ gives the interval which is between these years, and where numbers divisible by 4 mark the leap years as so many before or after Jesus Christ.
When counting things, we start from 1. When we count the number of chairs around a table we count them as chair 1, chair 2, …; when we count the years after Christ we have 1 AD, 2 AD, …; and when we count the years before Christ we have 1 BC, 2 BC, … . Here we do not use 0, counting starts from 1.
Measuring quantities is something different. Suppose we want to measure the quantity “the number of whole years from the birth of Christ”. During all of 1 AD this quantity would be 0, as no whole years would have passed from the birth of Christ. During the first decade (1 – 10 AD) this quantity would have a value from 0 to 9. During the second millennium (1001 – 2000 AD) this quantity would have a value from 1000 to 1999.
An aside on computer programming: In most computer programming languages (including all C-based languages), it seems that counting of elements in an array starts from 0 because actually we are not counting (if we were we would start from 1, which is the case in Fortran, for example). What we are doing is using the offset of the element we need from the beginning of the array. So the first element is accessed using 0 because it has zero offset from the beginning of the array.
So no 0 when counting objects, but 0 is a valid number when measuring quantities.
I think you are both wrong. As I admitted previously, pedantically the argument of whether 2000 or 2001 is in the new millennium is lost to the latter, although in common use it really doesn’t matter – something which seems settled.
Where I think you are wrong, Daphne (and I’m being pedantical here as well), is claiming that zero is not a number. Numbers are primarily descriptive, hence zero describes a non existing quantity (when placed on it’s own and not as a base). It’s true that there can not be a year zero, but for practical reasons, not mathematical.
Gianni, you are wrong in basing your argument on programming. Of course an array starts from zero in most modern languages, but that’s a programming standard, not mathematical. You can have a named array and call them “car”, “red” and “labourite” if you want, but you could still not parade that array around a mass meeting. The index in an array simply points to a location inside that array, which means it technically doesn’t matter what number you start and finish on.
Gianni, programmers start counting at zero, the rest of us don’t. Let me quote the Count from Sesame Street: no apples, nothing to count!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FpuYTy3q7Q
OK fine Andrea. Keep on counting from 1 when there could be an infinity between 0 and 1…… from 0.000000000001 of a second to 0.99999999999999 of a second. But you insist to start counting from 1. Fair enough. I can’t stop laughing!
Gianni, you must be a hell of a mind-boggling customer at the greengrocer’s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_0
Programmers do not start counting from zero, it’s just that some wrongly think that indexing and counting are the same thing.
Gianni, there’s no such thing as the 0th element of an array, there’s the 1st. Indexing the 1st element as 0 is just some referencing convention(which has it’s uses). You can call it anything else you want, like ‘a’, ‘100’, or ‘donkey’ to the same effect; it’s always going to be the 1st countable element of the array.
@Pat: I wasn’t basing my argument on programming, but on Gregorian calendars and Astronomical calendars.
In fact I said Daphne is right in saying year 0 does not exist if we were to stick to the Gregorian calendar. But she is absolutely wrong in saying that 0 is not a number and that you should always start counting from 1.
m@: Sorry my mistake I didn’t specify the language I was referring to (C#)… I mentioned programming just to give an example. I just didn’t want to go into technicalities, comparing an array of 60 to the number of seconds in one minute. The 60th second simply does not exist in 1 minute. The 60th second would be the starting point of the next minute. I hardly ever use arrays anyway…. I’m more into lambda expressions, dynamic programming etc.
Quoting from one of the hundreds of books:
“VB 6 programmers take note: in C#, the value of the size of the array marks the number of elements in the array, not the upper bound. In fact, there is no way to set the upper or lower bound—with the exception that you can set the lower bounds in multidimensional arrays , but even that is not supported by the .NET Framework class library. Thus, the first element in an array is 0. The following C# statement declares an array of 10 elements, with indexes 0 through 9:
string myArray[10];
The upper bound is 9, not 10, and you can’t change the size of the array (i.e., there is no equivalent to the VB 6 Redim function).”
Taken from Lordoftheblogs.com
The year 2001 to 2010 could be called “the 201st decade”, using ordinal numbers and the Gregorian calendar and it’s ‘year one’, but no one does that. No one counts decades as x1 through 11. We do not use the Gregorian ‘year one’ when we count ‘common decades’ (60s, 80s etc), and no one refers to the period of 1961 to 1970 as “The 196th decade”.
We call the years 1960 to 1969 “The decade of the Sixties”, or “The decade of the nineteen sixties”. The years 2010 to 2019 will be called the “Twenty Tens”, the years 2020 to 2029 are “The Twenty Twenties” etc. This is not debatable! You cannot refer to the years 2021 to 2030 as “The Twenty Twenties”, in the same way that you cannot refer to someone’s life between 21 and 30 as their “Twenties”, the correct spans are the years 2020 to 2029, and ages 20 to 29.
This is by far the most common and implicitly understood usage of the word ‘decade’. There doesn’t need to be any reference to ‘the start of time’ or whatever, each of these decades stands on it’s own.
Further, there isn’t that much that is simple about the Gregorian calendars start date, and certainly not logical. It’s not even correct when it comes to the birth of Christ!
The Gregorian calendar is superseded by ISO 8601, which is a modern, logical, and scientific approach to dates and times, and also happens to be the one that tallies with “the man on the street’s common sense”. This has year 0AD (same year as 1BC), so there isn’t even any argument regarding centuries or decades either, they all turn when the significant digit changes. This is the system I use, and it seems to be the system that everyone else has “voted” (with their feet) to use as well (even if they don’t realise it) (witness the 2000 celebrations versus the year 2001 celebrations).
I have seen this ‘not the turn of the decade’ argument quite a bit on the internet, but I find it strange that the people arguing that decades run from x1 to 11 haven’t either qualified their statement, nor researched obvious patterns of use and dictionary definitions.
Finally, I believe we must turn our backs on pedantic complications whenever possible, and certainty when such complications fly in the face of both modern international standards, and common understanding.
The Gregorian calender is dead, long live ISO 8601
Under the Gregorian calender, which is followed in most of the world, the year 1 BC is followed by 1 AD. Therefore the 21 Centuary began in 2001 and not as is popularly believed in 2000. The new decade does indeed start in 2011 and not 2010.There is nothing to argue about.
2000, 2001, whatever…. the new millennium is still shyte.
The problem seems to be in the interpretation of a ‘year’.
A year is not a point in time but a period of time. One starts counting a period of time at any smallest value desired but not at zero. If you want to count in days you start counting from day1. If you choose to count in seconds you start fro second 1. I would suggest any one interseted to read atopic abount ‘line numbers’. Although one may call year1 year0, one may not COUNT it 0. I can name anyone ‘nobody’, but I cannot talk to nobody unless he’s somebody whatever his name might be. the smallest unit one chooses to count in maybe very small but not zero. A lengthy discussion of this topic will eventually indulge into differential calculus. So in my opinion Daphne right on this argument.
Please excuse my lousy typing
One other explanation which may help
You don’y count 1minute thus:
0 0 0 0 0 ……………1minute, but
1s 2s 3s 4s 5s …………59s 1minute
Also, numbering is ‘naming’. Counting is aknowledgeing existence. Was killing prisoner #0 at Auswitz not a murder because his number was 0. Or killing prisoner #21 equivalent to 21 murders for that matter.
Firstly a new decade stars whenever you want it to… so probably this is the reason for so much disagreement…..
Secondly the 2010s have already started. Wikipedia and the bbc all consider 01/2010 the start of the twenty-tens…..
In general, i think this article is trying a bit too hard to pick on JM…. (Ps I am not his supporter .. even thinking about it nauseates me).
Not to talk about the “sounding like sour grapes”, taken of the back of the cornflakes box, comment about PHDs. This comment really bothers me because it shows your poor knowledge of what is involved in obtaining a PHD.
It would have been more appropriate to comment about how certain MPs obtained their MBAs……
Still find it strange you find so little wrong with the current administration and find it more appropriate to waste time throwing sh*t at at a sh*t magnet.
Of course there can be a year 0. Just because you are good with numbers, it certainly doesn’t mean you know anything about mathematics as you have proved again and again in this thread. You may very well be right about the fact that the first year was year 1(this subject doesn’t particularly interest me) but it’s definitely not down to mathematical reasoning. Measuring anything starts from zero, but this doesn’t mean that until you reach 1 full measure, we have “nought”. That’s why the decimal system has a decimal point and that is why time is also measured in days, hours, minutes, seconds, and so on. You have been flaming people and Madonna santa Gesu hanin, you are completely wrong……fact.
Daphne I know this post is old but doctor Muscat is right.
Easy explanation come from the fact that 0-9, than 10 (extra digit) 10-99 then 100 etc… 0 is always at the start of a series
An when you count to 10 euros, you start at 1 because the nought is already there. Ten euros please? (The zero has already been received) so you start at 1.
Hope this explanation makes you a better mathematician, cause you’re currently very poor at it from what I can read.
sorry forgot to tell you that’s because decimal works on 10 power 0, 10 power 1, 10 power 2 which equate to 0, 10, 100, etc…
if you want serieses ending in 9 use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonary
I think all of you are confusing matters when you apply maths, the calender system and programming together. They all have their own system. All of them have their own flaws. Programming return with a divide by zero error where maths accomplishes an answer. The calender is just an estimation if one is to bear in mind that jesus was born on the 25th on not on the 1st of January and there are many counter claims to the date. Also the calendar and current date system is inaccurate and every few hundred years this has to be fixed. that is why we have the leap year to re-synch the timing. Even maths has its own parodoxes and flaws. That is my opinion, ps Daphne thanks for correcting my spelling mistakes.
Markie, your opinion or have you been googling again?
Herbert
10 to the power of 0 equates to 1 and not to 0. Be careful with your maths.