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Overheard today (kids talking in the back seat)
Elder: What number is the lowest floor in the building? (referring to place we just left)
Younger: Zeroth floor
Elder: No it is the first floor!
Younger: No, zeroth floor!
(this goes on for some time)
Younger is 5. 
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I have this problem in the US where they seem to think the ground floor is the first floor and the first floor is the second floor, etc. Weird. It doesn't seem to matter how many times I try to correct them, they still keep getting it wrong!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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It's probably the imperial system - it rots the brain you know! 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Come on Griff, there is nothing wrong with the Imperial system of measurement.
12 inches in a foot
3 feet in a yard
1760 yards in a mile
Makes perfect sense to me.
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IF we had 12 toes and 12 Fingers... THEN this Imperial System would make sense!
Worse, 11 and 12 should be NAMED: One-Teen, and Two-Teen, but NO, the TEENS did not start until 13.
It is NO WONDER we are dead last in math
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Kirk 10389821 wrote: IF we had 12 toes and 12 Fingers... THEN this Imperial System would make sense!
It is NO WONDER we are dead last in math
IF we had 12 toes and 12 Fingers... Math would be easy.
10 can be divided by 2 and 5 only.
12 can be divided by 2,3,4 and 6.
Truth,
James
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James,
And that, my friend, is why they CHOSE 12 as the base. (and why 13 is the first TEEN)
It was literally a base 12 approach. It was a lot easier to divide whole things up.
But their foresightedness ended there abruptly. The system does not scale well.
Much like Roman Numerals. They work. They are obvious enough, but they get worse and worse.
What was that last Superbowl Number? (In Roman Numerals). Try doing division in Roman Numerals.
Without converting back and forth. Pure fun.
On the other hand. 10 is not more natural than any other number.
I challenge people to define time in terms of a metric system that works!
(So that 1 day = 10 hrs. 1 hr = 10 minutes, and 1 minute = 10 seconds. 1 month = 10 days, and 1 year = 10 months). Boy that would be fabulous. Of course, we would have to stop using the SUN as a clock, LOL.
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Roman numerals were awful.
There's nothing particularly special about 10 as a base, though. It is most likely because we have 10 fingers.
The problem with Roman Numerals is that it is an inconsistent implementation.
You could easily have a base 12. You just need 12 numerals.
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I've thought this through before, but only within a Day's context (because a day is based on the rotation of the earth and a year is based on the revolution of the earth around the sun, you CAN'T have anything other than 365.25 (approximately) days in a year).
But for a day, if you have 100 units in the day, each would be very close to 15 minutes of our current measurement (14 minutes, 24 seconds). Since there are 100 in a day, they would be centidays. Since that term sounds horrible there would probably need to be something else to call them - maybe "hours" would just be redefined? If you divide each of those centidays/hours into 1000 smaller units, those would be fairly close to 1 second each (0.864 seconds) and could be called millihours (or maybe still "seconds" for each of use). Having units of time similar in duration to what we're comfortable with would make it easier to get buy-in.
All of that is moot, though, because almost all computer software would have to be rewritten. If someone had come up with this BEFORE computers I think it would have stood a better chance.
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but we own the programming language community. LOL
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Kirk 10389821 wrote: It is NO WONDER we are dead last in math
No, it's not "math", it's "maths"
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xiecsuk wrote: No, it's not "math", it's "maths"
And there goes the English scores...
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When you walk into a multi-storied building from street level, what is the first floor you enter? (Hint: the answer is in the question.) See? We 'Merkans have some logic to our madness.
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
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The ground floor, obviously! The first floor above that is the "first floor", etc. Duh! 
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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I guess it depends what you define as "floor" I guess.
Here in Canada (ex-pat Brit here) there are inconsistent implementations.
I have seen:
1) Lobby, First floor, ...
2) Lobby, second floor, ...
3) Mezzanine, first floor, ...
And of course it is quite common to miss floor 13, as I guess some consider 13 unlucky.
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The university I went to had the basement as floor 1, the ground level floor as 2 and so on.
I wonder what they do at the Pentagon[^]; it has 5 floors above ground and two basement levels.
There are a lot of office buildings and missile silos that have numerous basement levels.
I'm retired. There's a nap for that...
- Harvey
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From Wikipedia:
Quote: Floors in the Pentagon are lettered "B" for Basement and "M" for Mezzanine, both of which are below ground level. The concourse is located on the second floor at the Metro entrance. Above ground floors are numbered 1 to 5.
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The alien artifacts are in area 51, not the pentagon. They were in the pentagon, but then the "plane" hit the building ...
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> ... and two basement levels.
Plus all the ones containing the alien artifacts....
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Yes, the ground floor is the first floor. I really don't see the problem.
By the way, I've seen it both ways in America. Some buildings have a G for ground, and 1 for the floor above it. Others just have 1 for ground floors.
The real question is, should there be a 13th floor? Or should it skip from 12 to 14? 
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
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But we fix that by skipping the 13th floor. 
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0 is ground level. A floor is above ground level, and anything else is wrong.
If 1 was ground floor, 0 would be in the ground. Then it would stop making sense to even count negative.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Over here the floor at ground level is the first floor. It does make sense in a way, since the highest floor has a number equal to the total number of floors. The ones below the ground are B1, B2 etc, increasing downwards.
My point was that kids don't usually count from zero (unless they were C programmers in a previous incarnation?)
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Indivara wrote: The ones below the ground are B1, B2 etc, increasing downwards.
As does any modern hospital. I was wondering why there was a sudden need of a character-prefix.
Where do the buttons prefixed with C lead to?
Indivara wrote: My point was that kids don't usually count from zero (unless they were C programmers in a previous incarnation?)
It is not a point of from "where" to start counting, as to count "what is". Youngest is right.
Go stand outside. That's 0 floors. You are at "level 0". Yes, build a floor, we'll call that one. Dig, and we'll call it -1. The latter is counting, but the first is merely a statement of what is if you go outside - 0 floors!
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: Where do the buttons prefixed with C lead to?
An alternate dimension.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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