maybe you want to get in touch w/me?

chaGrin at EmergeNncyGrounD dot LAND would be one way to do that

administrivia note: the location (of this file) is new as of October 2025

Somewhere there exists a podcast i created named Yule Log on Steroids, and just yesterday (or the day before? (it's early September, 2024 as i put this content here)) it occurred to me that our programmer's most common mistake, the venerable off by 1 error is in fact potentially an oversimplification of reality in some cases. What occurred to me (as i was thinking about date ranges, and not in a programming context, but just in terms of natural language and how we communicate with each other and how we "count") is that with time sequences (whether our units are days, or seconds, or minutes or hours, or weeks or months or years or centuries or millenia or any other duration), the potential for an off by 1 error exists on each end of the range. Creating an opportunity for one to have a difference of opinion (that has quite some validity on "both sides" of the potential argument) over the number (of days) which could differ not just by 1, but by 2.

And it occurred to me that some entity (whether it becomes a podcast, a forum, or something else) named 0ff_by_2 ought to be imagined into existence.

To continue on and really be explicit, let's take a range of dates. Today is Friday the 6th of September. How many days until next Tuesday the 10th of September? Simple subtraction tells us 4. But what are we counting? Another way to do this would be to count today as the first day, tomorrow (Saturday, the 7th) as the 2nd day, Sunday the 8th as the 3rd day, Monday the 9th as the 4th day, and then Tuesday the 10th would make 5 days. Or we could just count the days in between now and Tuesday, giving us only 3 days (tomorrow, Saturday the 7th, then Sunday the 8th and then Monday the 9th). Because how do we decide when measuring things such as these what gets counted? In the end, it doesn't really matter as long as we are in agreement with the person who we're talking to about what "rule" we're using in terms of the inclusion or exclusion of the days on the ends of our range. So we have possible answers in this case of 3, 4, or 5, which leads to the conclusion that we might sometimes have an off by 2 error between two possible answers.

It's possible you think i'm being pedantic (well you'd be right about that, i love to be pedantic!), but whether i am or not, there's really something here. Another piece of evidence to support this involved an experience i had a few weeks ago with my (then not quite yet 6 year old) granddaughter. We were playing a board game and when she moved her piece, she invariably counted the space she was on as one (whereas we progammers would index that space as the "zeroth" step of the move). Over and over (even with me trying to correct her and explain each time), she would start counting where her piece was. So yeah, how to define each end of a range is not really a completely simple issue which has a universal, bulletproof answer. Instead, as with most things in life, it's messy...

if you like, you can bounce over to a couple other domains i own/host/have-created-content-on to learn more about me (though most or all of the content you'll find at those locations is not as new as what you're reading on this page).