Re: Ebisedian number system (I)

Christian Thalmann writes:
 >
 > Consider:  Between the beginnings of the years 100 AD and 300 AD lie
 > exactly 200 years.  Between the beginnings of the years 300 BC and
 > 100 BC lie exactly 200 years.  But between the beginnings of the years
 > 100 BC and 100 AD lie 199 years.
 >

The beginning of a BCE year is equivalent to the end of a CE year,
because you're counting in opposite directions.  I will concede that
this is not entirely intuitive, but it does make sense.  One and a
half years BCE falls in the year 2BC - one and a half years CE falls
in the year 2CE.

 > Obviously, if we tried to map those two separate systems of reckoning
 > onto a single continuous set of numbers, we'd have to call the year
 > 100 BC the year -99 AD, not -100 AD!  That's the counterintuitive
 > part.
 >
[...]
 > > We could name years
 > > for the number of years since the origin (start of January 1, 1CE
 > > (which would become 0CE) but that would give us two years zero.
 >
 > Not at all.  Just call the year in which Christ was born the year
 > 0 AD = 0 BC, then we'd have no problem.  The year 100 BC would be
 > -100 AD, and distances between the systems would be consistent.
 >
 > Our current system splits the continuum into two parts, and maps each
 > onto the natural numbers.  That's more complicated and less intuitive
 > IMHO.  I can see no reason why the time before Christ should be
 > viewed as a different continuum as the time after Christ.
 >

Well, I've looked at your suggestion, and I've decided that it's not
worse than the present one.  But I've decided that trying to map
continuous entities to integers over an origin is a bad idea anyway.

Your system works well so long as we consider years as integers only,
as indivisible units.  This is certainly possible, as we generally
talk about sub-year times in terms of months or smaller units.
Nonetheless, consider:


Real numbers (displacement from origin)

 |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |
-4    -3    -2    -1     0     1     2     3     4
 |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |     |
Existing system
 |4BCE |  3  |  2  |  1  | 1CE |  2  |  3  |  4  |
Your proposed system
 | -3  | -2  | -1  |  0  |  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |


So your years all end at the distance they're named for after the
origin.  It's workable, and it has certain advantages, but either it's
asymmetrical about the origin or it doesn't have an origin at all.
Try explaining _that_ to people who want to know when to celebrate the
millenium. (Of course, we won't be having that particular problem for
a while.)  There couldn't be any 21st century, because we wouldn't be
measuring from any point.  I suppose we could have century 21. But
does it begin with 2000 or 2001?

Personally I'm beginning to think we'd be better off doing it as we do
our ages.  The epoch is now 2001 years old.



 > What I've always found especially counterintuitive about the current
 > system:  If the year 1 before Christ's birth is immediately followed
 > by the year 1 after Christ's birth -- where is the year in which
 > Christ was born?
 >

Well, to an approximation, He was born at the instant when 1BC turned
into 1AD, so the system is defined such that He wasn't born in a year
at all.  What he actually did is irrelevant, as he wasn't even born
within a year of the origin.