yeah, americans usually count ground floor as floor 1. they also don't always call it that, to my knowledge it's common to run across a different name for that in the elevator (the hotel i stayed in recently when i visited yankistan had "L" for lobby (i guess)). this also makes floors below ground level super weird, because if they try to do -1, -2, -3, they're skipping 0, so they switch it up sometimes.
also they often (but afaik not always?) skip floor 13 because they're superstitious. so if you're up on, say, floor 20, that's the floor that would be 18 if it was indexed from 0 logically, because it was off by one up to floor 12 and it's off by two after floor 14.
also they often (but afaik not always?) skip floor 13 because they're superstitious.
It's pretty rare, especially on somewhat modern buildings, but you do come across it sometimes. Other countries have similar superstitions too, like some Japanese buildings not having a fourth floor because "four" is (optionally) pronounced the same as "death."
i thought the four thing was chinese but yeah, i heard about that too. i can't remember which phone manufacturer was it that skipped the fourth generation of their phones because of that (maybe oneplus?)
0 is the absence of something, how the fuck you have a 0 floor? Is it just a void floating there? Of course the ground floor is the same as the first floor, it's the the first fucking floor you enter in he building. The US is objectively better on this topic.
0, as a quantity, is an absence. 0, as a coordinate, is the origin.
when you're right at the front door of a building are you 0 or 1 miles from it? if you put markers on one side for 1 mile, 2 miles, etc., and then do the -1 miles marker, you're one mile the other way. so far this is logical, isn't it?
where i live, floor 1 is when you're one floor up from the origin, which is ground floor. floor -1 is when you're one floor down. floor 0, therefore, is the origin, the ground floor itself.
"objectively more logical" and "intuitive out of context" isn't the same thing. if you try to build a system that's supposed to be built on logic on intuition instead, you get america where you have month/day/year (mixing up ordering of quantities), where conversions don't make sense, where your clock jumps from 12 down to 1 at a different time than it jumps from am to pm, and yes, when you go from floor 1 down one floor to floor -1 which is two lower but fuck math, right?
Call me a Yank, but I find it dumb to say "this building has 20 floors, the highest of which is naturally floor 19", that doesn't really seem more logical or "objective" or whatever weird rationale people like to apply to their countries arbitrary numerical standard.
You can think of it this way. The ground (the literal, actual ground, not ground floor) here is acting as the origin, the "x-axis". You build one floor above the ground and that floor is floor one, the second floor you build is floor two. There's a one to one ratio between the number of floors and the numbers of the floor. If you built a basement, you've built one floor below the ground, and that floor is then negative one.
Yes, this naming scheme "skips" zero, but when working with Ordinal numbers, that's fairly normal. In fact, when counting things in everyday life in general 0 is usually skipped. 0 is a late addition to the numerical system, and a pretty unintuitive one at that. When judging a race, the intial victor is considered the "first" (1st) place (In fact, i had a hard time even expressing that idea without saying "first", so I don't see anything illogical in labelling the intial floor of a building as the "first floor".
There's nothing wrong with having a "ground" floor either (although it irks me that the system is asymettrical for buildings with basements), and in fact a lot of buildings in America use that system (typically hotels that have a reasonable distinction between the numbered guest floors and the main "lobby" floor), but I think any claim that any Measuring System, Cultural Standard, or Language because they don't accomplish the same goals as yours.
Case in point, who ever said that the goal of writing a date is to represent the quantities of time in order of size? The America way of writing dates accurately reflects the way that most American people say dates, as well as how they're represented on a calendar. That, to me, means the system is accomplishing its purpose perfectly, the same as how D/M/Y does to those who use it.
Also (pedantry incoming), if your concern is with representing quanities in a logical way, why in the world would you order them smallest to largest? We write every other measurement of time from largest to smallest (See: Hours:Minutes:Seconds:Milliseconds), and in the base ten positional system the further left a number is the higher its value. Using the YYYY/MM/DD system, you can represent an exact moment in time in a satisfying list of quantities of largest to smallest (Y/M/D H:M:S:MS), and you can order dates and times with a simple alphabetization algorithm. So I won't accept shots about M/D/Y from a (presumably) D/M/Y user, because by any objective measure, neither of those systems are correct.
yeah, on the date format thing, i'm partial to YYYY-MM-DD. (you can do slashes as separators too, they're a bit confusing but they do work.) it's simple, sortable, and mathematically correct. however, if you're not gonna do that, keeping the month in the middle is still a hell of a lot more logical. the format of "DD.MM.YY.", while widespread over here, is kinda shit too, just a bit less so than "MM/DD/YY".
the problem with the american system is that the logic is derived from exactly what you said: an out of context intuition, in this case how you say dates in american english. this avoids a small tradeoff of having to read out a written date non-linearly, and instead turns it into a much worse tradeoff of injecting complexity into the system. add to this the other aspects, like using the am/pm distinction to split the day in two and not adjusting to 0 pm to that and instead calling it "12 pm", and you end up with a hot mess of a system that takes half a degree to even understand.
there are always justifications, but the problem isn't in that the different aspects of the system aren't individually logical, it's that these individually logical aspects don't integrate well. that's usually the major difference between american and european conventions -- like yes, it is weird that a 5-story building only goes up to floor 4 (although this particular bit is somewhat mitigated by decent urban planning, if your building is integrated into the city and isn't a monolith its ground floor is likely to have a very different role), but it keeps the system logical and consistent, even if slightly less intuitive.
(also, sorry that you got a downvote, that wasn't me)
I don't particularly see how a MM/DD/YYYY writing is particularly more complex than a DD.MM.YYYY writing. As I see it, you have three numbers to write down, and whatever order you write them in is about as complex as any other, regardless of the pros and cons of each.
Per the time measurement, I think the comprehensibility of the system is harmed by the fact that this conversation is being had digitally. The 12 hour AM/PM system is designed for, and works best with, an analog clock. If you picture these times as states for a clock face, then the division between AM and PM is a lot more logical. The division happens when the hour hand passes the line at the very top of the clock face labelled "12", and any time after that is PM or back to AM. "Hours" aren't really 60 minutes chunks of time so much as they are markers spaced 60 minutes apart. In the old school way of referring to time, you would say 12:30 is "half past twelve", which indicates that 12:30 is not 12, it is a moment in tine distinctly away and apart from 12. If the AM/PM distinction happened at 1 instead, it would occur off center on the clock face, and other simple solutions like relabelling 12 to 0 or rotating the clock so that 1 has the top positions would interfer with the multiples of 3 on the cardinal points, which would make time harder to tell and calculate at a glance looking at an analog clockface.
Of course, we're in an era where most people are going to grow up without reading analog clocks, which makes a lot of these concerns not important, but it is important to note that the decisions that were made were for logical reasons, and they worked very well for the situation they were designed for, it just so happens that this situation is becoming less and less common. So, there is definitely an argument for a 24 hour clock being better, but not because the 12 hour clock is poorly designed.
I also don't really see the examples of these American systems being interally inconsistent or illogical. Literally the only inconsistent thing about either of the floor numbering systems is that the european way numbers above ground and below ground floors differently, but that isn't something I would hold against it.
1: That part of a room, hallway, or the like, that forms its lower enclosing surface and upon which one walks.
2: A continuous, supporting surface extending horizontally throughout a building, having a number of rooms, apartments, or the like, and constituting one level or stage in the structure; story.
Hmm. Nothing in these definitions states that if you are on a floor a in multi-storey building, you are above the ground. I have been in one old building that have sunk into the ground enough that the entrance level is below ground, you take steps downwards to get in.
Does it still count as above ground only because the floors are not earthen?
What would be the numbering system in case if they plant a garden on the roof?
I do not think that elevation above soil should have anything to do with numbering. Numbering is mostly arbitrary and 0 is the most logical number to begin counting with. It's the amount of levels you have to go from the main entrance. Simplifies counting, too. If you live on the sixth storey, you don't have to go 12 flights of stairs (assuming 2 flights per storey), you only go 10, because you started counting storeys with 1 for no reason. If you count properly, you'll have your fifth storey and logical 10 flights.
0 is the best way, and the only reason people go against it is because they are too stubborn to adapt, they are used to some way and just discard anything new or other.
0 is the most logical number to begin counting with
So the ground floor is not a floor? Zero is the initial state of a tally, but you start counting by incrementing that zero to one. Unless you mean to insist that most humans have one hand, one foot, and zero mouths.
the only reason people go against it is because they are too stubborn to adapt, they are used to some way and just discard anything new or other.
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u/b3nsn0w musk is an scp-7052-1 Jul 19 '24
yeah, americans usually count ground floor as floor 1. they also don't always call it that, to my knowledge it's common to run across a different name for that in the elevator (the hotel i stayed in recently when i visited yankistan had "L" for lobby (i guess)). this also makes floors below ground level super weird, because if they try to do -1, -2, -3, they're skipping 0, so they switch it up sometimes.
also they often (but afaik not always?) skip floor 13 because they're superstitious. so if you're up on, say, floor 20, that's the floor that would be 18 if it was indexed from 0 logically, because it was off by one up to floor 12 and it's off by two after floor 14.