Learning to count, thanks to Victoria Coren
Sunday, November 15th, 2009
I find the need to blog at length about very little – so many others do it better than I could anyway. But something came up on Twitter today that I have to comment on, because getting basic math wrong really bothers me.
As a wannabe poker player, I follow several “pros” on Twitter, and British great Victoria Coren is one of them. Today, Ms. Coren commented on a list she’d seen – I think it was “the top 10 books of the decade” or something. She joked that this was the wrong time of year – maybe after Christmas, or early after New Year’s maybe. I responded that it wasn’t the wrong time of year – it was the wrong year.
Decades, centuries, millennia – they’re funny things to people for some reason. We, as a people, have a bizarre obsession with round numbers. Why is a slugger’s 200th home run more significant than, say, his 197th? I have no idea – and when it comes to round numbers of years, we get even more crazy. The Year 2000 was huge – the “dawn of a new millennium” some said. “Nope,” I said, “it’s the end of the old one.”
You disagree?
Okay – we’ll discuss. First, let’s get agreement on two basic rules. To keep things simple, I will include something of familiarity – a Hannah Montana album – in my explanations.
1. We start counting with “1”.
We learned in school that there are two basic sets of numbers – Whole numbers, which run from zero through uncountable infinity (“aleph-one”, I believe, is the term for the high end). A smaller subset of this is counting numbers, also called non-negative integers, a set that starts with 1 and runs to a countable infinity (I believe they call the high end of this set “aleph-null”). Zero cannot be a counting number – by having zero of something, you have nothing, and therefore nothing to count. I can’t count the number of Hannah Montana albums I own, because I don’t own any.
2. Years have length.
Children that are desperate to grow up say they’re “seven and three-quarters”. They can say that because years, like a lot of other phenomena, are more than instants in time. They have duration – it takes them a while to expire. If I owned a Hannah Montana album, I could potentially make a pizza, call all of you to complain about listening to it, contemplate the best way to plug up my ears, and beg for death for (I assume) about 30 minutes before it ended. So go years – most last about 12 months.
Agreed? Good. Then you already understand my point. But I’ll explain in detail.
Forget religion and how the birth of Christ figured into how we count years. Just go back a ways – pretend along with me that the very first Hannah Montana album came out on March 15th of the first year of recorded history. You want to mark this auspicious occasion on the calendar hanging on your wall.
I ask you: What year is displayed on that calendar?
Is it Zero? Because that’s dumb, and makes no sense based on Rule #1 above. No – the first year ever was the “Year One”. We start counting with one, so Year One is the first year, and the release date of that historic first Hannah Montana album is March 15th, 0001.
Okay – so we’re in agreement on the full release date of that album. Based on that, when could Protohistoric Disney release the Tenth Anniversary edition of that album? It wouldn’t be on March 15th, 0010 – would it? Of course not, because only nine years and change would have elapsed. There would still be nine months until the end of 0010 (remember Rule #2?), and then three or so more months until March 15th on 0011. Since 1 + 10 = 11, the Tenth Anniversary Edition of that first album would be released on March 15th 0011.
This seems pretty easy, right? If so, why don’t we apply those same rules to the calculation of milestones like decades and centuries?
If we agree that the first year started on January 1, 0001, why is it so hard to understand that next decade started on January 1, 0011? So by extension - the decade we’re currently living in started on January 1, 2001. . .right? Because we start counting with one (rule #1) , and the previous year has to end for the new one to begin (rule #2). So by extension, 2000 wasn’t the beginning of the new millennium – it was the end of the previous one. The entire year 2000 had to go by first. The whole world was celebrating the end of the previous millennium, century, and decade. We had to let the whole year go by before we could start celebrating the starts of the next ones.
So you were close, Ms. Coren. Yes – the list is early. But in actuality, it’s much, much earlier than you think. We can celebrate the end of the decade at the end of next year – when it ends. Lets spend the next year getting ready for the real start of the next decade, and work on our math skills while we’re at it.
Tags: Math
Posted in Geek | 2 Comments »