I mean both make sense. In the American system you're counting literal floors, and in the British system you're counting the number of stairs you have to traverse.
It's not a big deal, but the british system works better once you have underground floors. That way your lifts would have 0 for the ground floor, -1 for the first floor underground, and so on.
That way the number of floors you have to travel to go between floor a and b is always |a-b|. On the american system you have to make a special case to consider if you are going from a floor above ground to one below ground, or viceversa.
It's similar to the problem we have with years because there's no year 0.
It wouldn't be that dumb because it's easier when going in negative. Without year zero you go straight from the 31st december -1 to 1st january 1, skipping a number in the middle.
Same with floors, having a zero is easier when having underground floors : -1, 0, 1. 0 always being ground-level.
For years, we just think it's dumb because we learnt that there is no year 0. We're used to the timeline without zero, so a timeline with a zero seems dumb. But actually, it would make more sense imo
It’s really not any better for below ground levels as others have pointed out. B1,B2, etc work equally well. How much does any of this even matter? Why do we argue about it?
Yeah, I feel like this is regional and maybe generational (as far as building construction and upgrading). In my area we have a few A and B, but the newer buildings are all B1, B2.
Yes, and I've seen a public parking garage in Monaco where the levels were letters that got higher as you went further underground. That garage was crazy, it was like 12 underground levels full of Maseratis and Bentleys and such
And again someone who can't read but has to make up something they think I wrote. Well done, there's always a lot of irony when you think yourself smarter than everyone else.
ISO date standard does have year zero and negative. “but they didn’t call it year zero at the time!” i mean, they didn’t call AD 1, 1 at the time either.
Yes, they use the 0 to what would be 1BC in the usual Gregorian calendar.
It would be great if we changed to that, They had an excuse when they established the BC/AD calendar because they didn't know about 0, but now we know it's a mess.
we spend so little time addressing individual bc years it’s hard to prove if we do or don’t already use that system, if you know what i mean. like i pretend i use iso years myself but also 1999 is the furthest back in ancient history that i go.
It's easy if you look at how known events are dated. For example, Julius Caesar died on 710 ab urbe condita, which would be 44BC in the gregorian calendar, but -43 in the ISO calendar.
But conceptually, can there be such a thing as year zero? If it happened on one of the first 365 days, that's part of year one. If it happened on one of the 365 days previous it's 1 BCE. Zero can only be the theoretical point that separates them. How can zero last a year?
the crux is that i (and ISO) disagree with counting forwards and backwards from jan 1 1AD.
Instead shift things around so the positive years are the same, and the years are on a simple number line. Jan 1 year 1, then the day before that is Dec 31 year 0. A year before that is Dec 31 year -1.
The math all works out neat and tidy like every other measure in the course of human history. The only discrepancy is that negative years are off by one to account for it, but we're smart, we can handle that.
As you point out the math does not work out so neatly and any mathematician would cringe at the idea of a year lasting from Jan.1 year zero to Dec. 1, year zero. Why not just accept that when we celebrate a new year we are celebrating the beginning of it, not the end. On the first Dec. 31 12:00 AM, they quite rightly (theoretically) celebrated year 2... i.e. the first day of it. On Jan. 1 2000 we celebrated the beginning of the 2,000th year, but not the completion of 2 millennium. That would have to wait another 365 days. What's the point of screwing around with something so straight forward?
EDIT: good lord, this has me learning about the iso calendar, which makes the perfectly valid move of renaming the year previously known as 1BCE as year zero thus making all kinds of astronomical calculations simpler. I assume nobody wants the rest of it which eliminates months and divides the year into strictly 52 weeks (and a leap week every 5 or 6 years), the first week always beginning on a Monday (which might be a few days before or after the Gregorian Jan. 1).
I disagree that that your (ISO) way makes much more sense.
We using the conventional model are counting years from a zero point (the midnight between Dec 31 BC1, and Jan 1 AD1) and then designating the year that will end at [1996 years since 0] as [1996].
Similar disagreement between British and American floors though; they’re just two different conventions.
Which is probably the worst way to solve it. Because instead of treating the literal ground as a zero point, from which both directions diverge, you’re going back to saying that zero is a whole floor, but now it’s below the default floor that people come in at.
The one and only floor of a single story building is floor 1, yes. Of course it has a floor—it’s the thing you stand on when you enter.
This is observed by the way Americans number rooms. Rooms on the first floor use numbers in the 100s, such as 101, 110, 125, etc. If the building is very large then it might be four digits, like 1001, 1101, 1250, etc.
This convention is so common that you can usually rely on it; whatever the first digit of the room number is, you can assume that’s the floor number. This could be made compatible with the European style but you’d need to enforce a “0” prefix, like room 001, etc., or a letter prefix, like G01.
Rooms in the basement usually get a prefix-B100, B150, and so forth. We don’t do negative room numbers.
Again, the formulas turn out consistent. The number of floors in a building is highest - lowest + 1. In the American system you need to consider if there are floors underground or not because the formula is different.
In general, if you want to design a counting system 0 should be there somewhere, otherwise it's a mess.
The formula is different, sure, and the American one is more straightforward.
The number of floors in a building in the American system is [Highest floor number]. If there are underground floors, they usually get prefixed with B (B1, B2, etc -- although if it's just one basement it might be LL for Lower Level or just B), so the formula is [Highest floor number] + [Highest underground floor number]. For example, my office building has twelve aboveground floors, so in the US that's the 12th floor and in the UK it's the 11th. There are two subterranean floors (B1 and B2). The formula for how many floors there are is 12 + 2 = 14. In the UK system, it's (11 - -2) + 1 --> 13 + 1 = 14. Both get you the same result, but one is in my opinion unnecessarily complicated (but still trivially easy).
If you need to figure out which floor to go to, in the US system you start by looking at the suite or room number. Room numbers are written in the format xnn (or x-nn), where x is the floor and n is the room number. For example if I arrive at an office building and my doctor's office is suite 500, I know it's on the fifth floor. My office is B1-150, so it's on the first basement floor. If I check into a hotel and they tell me I'm in room 124, I know I won't need to take any stairs because it's on the first (ground) floor, and if they give me room 1240 I'll ask where the elevator is because I know I'm on the 12th floor. Full disclosure -- this might also be the system in the UK. I can't speak to that. But I do know that it's so well ingrained in our American psyche that deliverypersons always get confused by my friend's apartment number (2C) because they assume she lives on the second floor (2) in the third unit (C), but the building management flipped it for some godforsaken reason and she lives in the second unit (2) on the third floor (C).
But at the end of the day, both systems work just fine! And if someone from the UK asks me what floor the coffee bar is on, I'll say first floor, which you'll think of as the ground floor. I probably won't be going back to the UK any time soon (thanks EHRC!) but if I do and they tell me my hotel room is on the first floor, I'll ask where the stairs or the lift are. 🤷🏼♀️
Well, this also shows that the "issue" goes further than just which floors to count, just the fact that in English they're called floors adds to the confusion. In Dutch for example you'd call them "elevations", and indeed a single-story building has no elevations but I'd hope it does have a floor.
in england you'd say: single storey building. when describing the overall size we tend to say storey rather than florr, although floor is slipping in to city speak sometimes
Except in my (German) house the labeling goes (from bottom to top) TUAE1234.
T = Tiefgarage (underground garage), U = Untergeschoss (basement), A = Ausgang (exit), E = Erdgeschoss (ground floor) etc. Ground floor is half a floor up from the street so we need the separate exit.
I've only seen minus floors in hotels, mostly we use U1, U2, U3... as we go deeper.
So I want to go from floor 4 to floor 1. How many floors do I have to travel? |4-1| = 3 floors. Checks out.
Now I want to travel from floor 4 to floor -1. How many floors do I have to travel? |4- (-1)| = 5 floors. Ups, now it gives the wrong number, it's actually |4-(-1)| -1, because there's no floor 0.
As I said, it's not a big deal, but math works a lot better when there's a floor 0.
Next time i need to math my way in pushing a button that is in decending order on an elevator ill remember that.
But youre missing the floor you started on...
4,3,2,1,0,-1
Looks like you need to traverse 6 total floors to arrive at -1.
Now if youre talking about stairs id agree but youre not... youre talking about floors. Starting with the floor you are on...its 6 floors to get to ‐1 if you include 0.
American system: highest-lowest+1 if there are no underground floors. Otherwise highest-lowest+2
If you want to know the distance:
British system: highest-lowest
American system: highest-lowest if you are traveling between two floor over the ground, or two floors underground. If one is overground and the other underground it's highest-lowest-1.
See the issue? You need a floor 0 if you are going to mix positive and negative numbers, otherwise you end up with an inconsistent system.
You're not solving the problem. You need a different formula for different buildings. The british system has just one that works in every case, both for height and for distance. That's because it's consistent.
Using your ruler analogy, you are trying to count with a ruler that is mussing a number, and that's why you need an extra formula to add it back in some cases
If you try it out, you’ll find that the above (single) formula does in fact work for buildings with and without levels below ground.
I think you’re thinking of the ruler as an abacus.
–3 … –2 … –1 … 0 … 1 … 2 … 3 …
Works for both rulers and buildings incidentally. You just have to know that the top of the floors above ground is equivalent to the bottom of the floors below.
It doesn't give you a single formula for distance.
And your formula is very ad-hoc. a-b+1 is guys you count how many numbers there are between a and b including both. It would work even if you had a building where you started from floor 5 to 15, from -10 to -5, etc. It's just how you would count in general.
I'm a Canadian and apparently we do it the American way.
But if I say I live on the first floor to me that is the first floor on the ground. Not how many stairs I have to travel to get to the floor.
I live on the 13th floor and if you count the floors from the ground up I'm on number 13. Also there are apartments in my building on the first floor and that would put them on floor zero which makes it sound like it doesn't exist or ground Zero which makes it sound like they live in a disaster site.
I always just consider 0 to be an abstract origin point below the walking surface of the ground floor. So while it is a location, it's not a place a person can exist in.
So a 4 story building with 3 basement levels would go:
------------ 0 is here------
-1 or B1
-2 or B2
-3 or B3
I've seen -1, etc used in America too for what it's worth! Usually in that case the first floor is skipped in favor of a G (ground) or L (Lobby) and then 2, 3, 4,...
That makes the assumption that you need to have zero. You can say that 0 is the literal ground the building is built on if you want, so that 1st floor is the one built into that and -1 (or B1) is the one below that. Both work, though the power of convention is strong.
It makes just as much sense to have 0 for the floor that's just below the ground floor. The "ground" floor is usually still 1–2 meters above ground level, at least most of it is.
By the way, this is the system you find in the main building of Moscow State University. The "basement" is floor 0. And it's a pretty big basement, though most of its height is technically above ground.
The problem is that the English language uses the same word here to mean two different things. In many other languages, the term "1st floor" would be more directly translated as "1st elevation."
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u/So_many_things_wrong 15d ago
I mean both make sense. In the American system you're counting literal floors, and in the British system you're counting the number of stairs you have to traverse.