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Comment by netsharc

5 days ago

A friend (not Korean) said on his 29th birthday that he's starting his 30th year of life. It was an interesting perspective, because in general we celebrate our nth birthday after completing n years of life.

According to a traditional East Asian world view, your life is influenced by the powers that govern each unit of time -- hour, day, month, year -- that you pass through.

Under this system, the number of distinct powers that you were influenced by is more important than the exact number of days or years that you spent on this planet. Korean culture is still saturated with this stuff. You can DM a shaman your date of birth, and they'll use this kind of system to tell your fortunes.

Seventh hour is everything between 6:01 and 6:59, yes.

  • Yes.

    That is why half open sets, half open intervals, are convenient.

    If a bus leaves every 10 minutes starting at 1 PM, how many buses leave per hour ? Do we include the 2PM bus in the first hour ?

    It helps to cover the space by non-overlapping equal intervals.

    Shows up in 0 indexed for loops as well i < n

> in general we celebrate our nth birthday after completing n years of life.

Well it's literally like you say: your friend will "celebrate his 30th birthday after completing 30 years of life". If the 30th birthday happens after 30 years of life, then the 30th year of life happens before the 30th birthday.

Starting from one is more accurate in a pedantic kind of way if you're counting how long you've been alive. Since the average human pregnancy is about 40 weeks.

Personally I prefer to round 29 years 6 months up to «I’m now 30 years old». As you would expect to happen if you run round(29.5). For some reason, most cultures settled on either floor(age) or ceil(age).

  • Which cultures settled on ceil(age)?

    • The traditional system in China and its surroundings, 虛歲, is that you're born at the age of 1 and your age increases on the new year.

    • As the sibling comment mentioned, I was thinking of East Asian countries.

      There's another difference in that age++ there happens on Chinese New Year and not your own birthday, but that's an orthogonal point to the rounding, I think.

Funny how your birth day is not a birthday

  • It's definitely a birthday, hence the name. It's the day you turn 0.

    • It's a definition that could add 1 to everyone's birthday celebrations. A baby born on the 15th of June 2024 could be celebrating its 2nd birth day in a few days. Or well the family would. They'd celebrate the birth, and why not count that as a "birthday celebration".. Ha.

      Curiously I guess most of us celebrate the number of years completed.

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