numbers are hard

[marcicat]

31 day months are so wild -- like, today is the 27th already, but it will still be March on Friday!

(To be fair, numbers -- and dates in particular -- have never really made any sense* to me. I managed to fake it through school long enough to stop needing to take math classes, and luckily it turns out that we actually DO have calculators in our pockets all the time as adults, so take that, middle school math teachers!)

(*It's like this: I can look at the calendar, and count the days of the week starting with today and ending with the 31st, and clearly see that there are 5 days left in the month. But 31 - 27 = 4, which is too few. And 32 - 26 = 6, which is too many, so you can't just go around the numbers. Which means you must have to get an extra day from either the end of the sequence or the beginning, somehow, but how do you decide which one? Why only one? Why is such an easy thing so conceptually hard for me to grasp?)

Comments

[conuly]

When you - by which I mean you personally, not the generic you - look at the calendar and go "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday!" you're doing inclusive counting. You're counting the day you're on AND the last day, just like the Romans did.

But mostly we don't do inclusive counting. We certainly don't when we subtract in the usual way.

That's where your confusion is creeping in, at least in this area. You're looking at the calendar with inclusive counting, but you're doing subtraction without it.

[starandrea]

And 32 - 26 = 6, which is too many, so you can't just go around the numbers. Which means you must have to get an extra day from either the end of the sequence or the beginning, somehow, but how do you decide which one? Why only one?

GOOD POINT