{"id":221,"date":"2017-01-21T11:29:35","date_gmt":"2017-01-21T19:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ag6qr.net\/?p=221"},"modified":"2017-03-13T23:05:20","modified_gmt":"2017-03-14T06:05:20","slug":"italian-math-in-the-elevator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ag6qr.net\/index.php\/2017\/01\/21\/italian-math-in-the-elevator\/","title":{"rendered":"Italian math in the Elevator"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

I took this photo in an elevator on a recent trip to Italy. Notice the buttons are labelled negative one and zero. In the USA, I’ve never seen an elevator with floor “0”, never mind floor “-1”.<\/p>\n

This elevator is in a train station, and goes between ground level and an underground tunnel that allows people to cross beneath the train tracks.<\/p>\n

In many cultures, including Italian, the “1st floor” is the one above ground level — the one we would number the “2nd floor” in USA English. So it’s logical that ground level could be considered floor number zero. It’s as though the Italians use the C programming language convention of numbering arrays starting with 0, while in the USA, we use the FORTRAN convention of starting with 1.<\/p>\n

By logical extension of the number line, the Italian convention for the first level below ground is negative one.<\/p>\n

In the USA, such an elevator might have floors labelled “G” and “B”. I like the mathematically logical Italian way. Plus, it gave me the opportunity to give a quick math lesson to my son.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I took this photo in an elevator on a recent trip to Italy. Notice the buttons are labelled negative one and zero. In the USA, I’ve never seen an elevator with floor “0”, never mind floor “-1”. This elevator is in a train station, and goes between ground level and an underground tunnel that allows Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":222,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag6qr.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag6qr.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag6qr.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag6qr.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag6qr.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/ag6qr.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":340,"href":"https:\/\/ag6qr.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions\/340"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag6qr.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ag6qr.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag6qr.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ag6qr.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}