A baby born on Dec 31st is 1 year old, and the next day would be 2 years old … A 2 day old baby would be considered 2 years old. Glad they decided that this was beyond odd.
My daughter was born at 22:30 on December 31. In Korea she would have been considered 2 years old when she was born less than 2 hours previously.
I guess if you phrase it as “how many calendar years were you alive for?” rather than “how many years have you been alive?” then it makes a bit more sense, but it is in many ways a less useful measure of time. It’s a bit like how school years and calendar years don’t line up, so you sometimes need to do a bit of a mental conversion to recall which school year you would have been in for a particular date in the past.
Semi-related, I had a buddy in high school who was born on Dec 31 and another buddy who was born in January. The January buddy was biologically a year older than the December buddy, but they both were in the same class.
The second paragraph is such a mindfuck
Too bad they didn’t keep their very own system of measurement which is so much more convenient than the internationally recognized and simple system… Not looking in anybody’s direction
Convenient for people who were brought up using it, maybe. Let’s not pretend that it’s objectively better.
Hi, sorry that the /s wasn’t clear enough! English ls not my native language ans I sopetimes have difficulties conveying implicit elements in writing.
Buddy, English is my native language, and I also have the same problem. Don’t sweat it.
The article says the international system will be used in some settings, but the traditional system will continue to be used in other settings. In general, people won’t be forced to switch to a system they are not accustomed to… Not looking in anybody’s direction
babies are considered a year old on the day they’re born
Is there any useful idea behind this? That sounds completely dumb.
It’s just semantics. When you are born, you are in your first year of life, not your zeroth year of life. After a full year, you are one year old. Grammar varies from language to language, and sometimes one feels more natural.
Imagine everyone in English said “I’m in my 32nd year” instead of “I’m 31 years old.” Now you meet a foreigner who says the opposite. Translation issues abound!
deleted by creator
Jokes on you, my religion is Fortran ;)
My birthday can only be expressed in Lua
Well, you could have an array starting at zero, some old languages or pseudo code languages do that.
To be fair, we do the same shit with what century we are in.
You’re absolutely right. But as most people don’t measure their age in centuries (yet), it isn’t a problem.
I’m hoping the debate emerges when I’m in my 7th century.
Pity. My great-grandmother died at 103. She would often declare. "I’m One hundred and three, you know. " Towards the end. I think If I had thought at the time to say. “You’re in your second century” At the time. She would have taken huge pleasure is telling everyone that for her last few months.
You mean when you’re 6 centuries old?
Exactly 😂
Also, years themselves are technically numbered in this same “dumb” way: the Common Era (secular version of Anno Domini, “In the Year of our Lord”) began with 1 CE, not “Year zero”, because it was supposedly the First Year of Christ (and the concept of zero didn’t even exist then). Not that it really matters, because IIRC nobody knows the actual date (if any) of the birth of that Christ character to within a single year anyway.
Admittedly, it was more than 500 years after this Christ character, as you so amusingly notate, that they even started counting. And the concept of zero as a number was in place by then. The concept of zero as nothingness, or void, is much older. So really, the index from 0 or 1 debate is now at least 1500 years old ;)
While I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek when I said “that Christ character”, I was also trying to be accurate: there are people who believe Christ was 100% made-up (and lots of others who don’t of course), and I don’t know enough about it to say for sure.
Personally, I’m an agnostic atheist, so I’d need to see some actual evidence before I could honestly say I believe he did exist, but I’m not gonna say I know he didn’t exist either.
Gangnam Style! Op op op!
