Why aren't there 0 days?

[Hermiod]

Daniel Jackson makes a n00b error:

SAM: Uh, Dammit! This is NOT working!

DANIEL: This doesn't make any sense! It clearly says 3 to blue, 4 to orange, and 3 to blue!

JACOB: How much time do we have?

SAM: Less than a minute.

DANIEL: OK! These are Tobin numbers. This is 1, this is 2, this is 3...

SAM: Wait, wait! What about zero?

DANIEL: What?

SAM: Zero. Why didn't you say zero?

DANIEL: Uh, because there's no zero in the Phoenician numerical system.

JACOB: What if the Tobin added it?

SAM: He's right! Inventing technology with this level of sophistication would require a zero.

DANIEL: Why?

SAM: Just trust me! It's a math thing.

DANNY: So, I've been off by one this whole time?

 

[Brent]

In fact, thinking back to the calendar, we should really just start the beginning of the year as January 0, and keep going till the end of the year and it will be December 364, why should each month reset? It makes no sense, just count from 0 to start the year and end on the last days number, in continuous order!

So today would be June 161st

I'm a genius

 

[scotpens]

^ There's really no reason to use months at all. A month was originally a cycle or orbit of the moon (as it still is on the Jewish calendar). The months of the modern Western calendar have no relation to the phases of the moon; they're just 12 arbitrary divisions of the year. We could just say "day 161 of year 2010." It's called the ordinal date or Julian date.

 

[Brent]

i'm either really nuts or a genius here, but when we are born, we start at 0, like WHOA, mind just blown

 

[RJDiogenes]

Age is counted differently than objects (including years). If you're twelve years old, it means you've completed twelve years; if you were counting your years, like we do with the calendar, you'd be on number thirteen. Same with donuts or anything else. The first one is number one, not zero-- it exists and it's there.

 

[SilentP]

...because there's no word known as 'zeroth'? (i.e zero-th, akin to fourth, fifth etc.)

 

[Deckerd]

i'm either really nuts or a genius here, but when we are born, we start at 0, like WHOA, mind just blown

What did you think happened? The instant you were born you were 1? The 1 indicates a completion of a year, as RJD said. But you're only 0 until you're one second old.

 

[Finn]

We should note that Stardate 0.000 is Midnight, January 1, 2323, or something like that.

See, it didn't start at 1!!!

Which time zone?

 

[Lindley]

...because there's no word known as 'zeroth'? (i.e zero-th, akin to fourth, fifth etc.)

R. Daneel disagrees.

 

[John Picard]

There are 10 types of people. Those who can count in binary, and those who cant.

 

[Dac]

Zero is meant to denote the *lack* of something. Anything that actually exists cannot logically be numbered zero.

So when the lift says "Floor Zero", I'm entering a highly illogical area?

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Apparently. Who numbers a floor "zero" anyway?

 

[Lindley]

^ Apparently. Who numbers a floor "zero" anyway?

It's common in Europe for "floor 1" to be the first one above "ground".

However, most of the elevators (sorry, "lifts") I saw labeled the ground floor G rather than 0.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

No one starts counting from 0 fingers, that's why.

If I don't have any apples, I don't have any apples to count.

 

[Lindley]

Age is counted differently than objects (including years). If you're twelve years old, it means you've completed twelve years; if you were counting your years, like we do with the calendar, you'd be on number thirteen. Same with donuts or anything else. The first one is number one, not zero-- it exists and it's there.

This is going back to what I said earlier about distance, if you consider age to be distance along the time dimension. A distance of 0, or 0 time since an event, makes perfect sense.

Which in turn takes us back to the mathematician versus compute science angle. Mathematicians look at a sequence of objects and say, "This is a countable sequence, so obviously the first one is x_1."

Computer scientists look at that same sequence and say, "Let's store them in an array, so obviously the first one is x[0], since it begins 0 bytes from the start of the array."

 

[JiNX-01]

Am i crazy?

Yes. Tho' it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with your question.

 

[sojourner]

I remember in grade school we were learning rounding of fractions. The teacher I had would mark any fractions of .5 rounded down as wrong and told me .5 should be rounded up. as in to her .5 should be 1, 2.5 should be 3, etc. I never understood. To me, if you only have 5 parts of a ten piece pie, then you are closer to no pie than a whole pie. Turns out she was labeling the first "piece" 0. And thus began my slide in appreciation for math.

 

[Lindley]

Well, that's actually normal---.5 is rounded up. It's arbitrary but it's the rule.

 

[sojourner]

^but not logical when thinking in quantities.

 

[Lindley]

It's not illogical either----you'd need to add 5/10 to get to a whole number, or remove 5/10. Same amount of change required in either direction. It's right on the boundary, so an arbitrary decision was needed.

It turns out that a few things are simpler if you round up in that case, though, so that's what the policy is.