donathos said:
Er, so... out of curiosity, when you tell someone "I'm going to count to ten," do you start with zero? When a video game is released in some new IP, do you think that the first entry in the franchise should be #0? (Or is it a mistake to call it the "first entry"? Ought it be the "zeroth entry," or something like that?) I'm sympathetic to those who think that we ought to count the year 2000 as part of the twenty-first century, not the twentieth, and etc., because it certainly seems significant to watch that initial 1 change into a 2... but let's not turn that into making claims about "any counting" and "mathematically speaking a mistake." |
Yes you do start counting from zero, it's just that you count entire numbers and not fractions so you say "1" but 1 actually starts at zero.
Tell me when you were born if you had been able to speak, would you have said that you are 1 year old? Cause the reality is that you were ZERO years old, it's only after living a full year that you could say you are 1 year old and as soon as you turn 1 you start living your second year but because numbers in those examples are always entire when spoken of, you don't say that you are zero years old. But technically you are zero years old the first year of your life.
Sorry but mathematics are what they are and you can't change that. And people considered the change of millennium on Jan 1, 2000 for the exact reasons I have explained and NO ONE was foolish enough to think that on January, February, March etc.... 2000 it was still the 90's.
