This following BBC story has some ramifications for people who like to understand the Oriental go world even outside Korea.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-66028606

North Korea was ahead of South Korea.

I hope for the day the whole world counts age from conception as in Judaic culture. It is the only scientifically justifiable age counting system.

UH --- Judaic culture counts age from BIRTH, not conception. Perhaps you meant some other culture that considers itself in some way descended from/related to Judaism.

Actually, maybe not relevant to birthdays, but at least in counting things like the year of the reign of a king and all similar things in the Bible, they would in fact use the new year (for this purpose, the first day of yhe first month in spring) rather than the anniversary. So someone could be in the second year of his reign immediately after ascending the throne.

中国人一直用这种方法计算年龄，一个人一出生就是1岁，称为“虚岁”。
China people have been using this method to calculate age, a person is born is 1 year old, called "virtual year".

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Zhang-hu 章浒
Committed to the restoration Chinese traditional Weiqi
Research on ancient Weiqi rules & Classic (Dunhuang Classic and the Thirteen Chapters Classic)
From Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China

Why do the Chinese/Mongolians/Manchu/Koreans round it to 1 year? I really don't see the point in that. Just count their age when they're born . That way you can celebrate both lifedays and birthdays, lifedays for you and birthdays for your mother.

There are also folks who still look to the lunar calendar when considering things like their birthday.

Some people didn't even accurately record their birthday in the past (eg. real birthday in, say, July, but not recorded until September, resulting in an "official" September birthday).

Since age is such a big deal in Korean interactions, it can be argued that it's simpler when everyone increments their age at the same time: all of your classmates are kind of like equals, for example. You don't need to think about specific birthdays and change language accordingly.

That being said, international age is less ambiguous and is an overall better system.

It is good that the country is willing to be flexible and change things that don't make as much sense, anymore. We should be willing to change traditions when their no longer that valuable to society.

Some systems are just outdated and don't make a lot of sense, anymore.

*cough* electoral college *cough* *cough*

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be immersed

You can also argue that when someone is born, it is their "1st year of life". They may not have completed a year, but it's just a different way of counting.

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be immersed

Although it still falls short of making sense if you don't say they're in their second year a few months later . . . Humans just are attracted to incorrectness. Instead of having a time of 2022:06:01:02:10:35.452 year:month:day:hour:minute:second: We have this dumb idea of seperating date and time. What's the point of human intelligence if it's going to be used to make dumb formatting? I don't get it . . . I'll just pretend putting the day before the month doesn't exist



Depends on what the goal is! If it's democracy, then the electoral college outdated nonsense, but if the aim is to promote the interests of rich special interest lobby groups, it makes perfect sense!

I mean, the language here is ambiguous. If someone was born on December 31st at 11:59, 2022, how many "years" have they experienced? Certainly less than than a full calendar year of time. But they have experienced some of both 2022 and 2023 (two years).

It depends on the expectation you have behind what the number means. This interpretation is, of course, not very good at reflecting the timespan like the age we are more used to in America.

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be immersed

As unlikely as it sounds, age acts similarly to those ambiguous open to interpretation words that degrade language that politicians love, since it enables them to lie and lie about what other people say way easier, but I despise with burning passion, however age only acts similarly to those words, so I don't have a problem with the word age. However

Anything where everyone's count increases on the same day is a Year Group. So the entire country of Korea is a school? Haha. Western journalist could have easily decided to decided to translate it as year group but instead called it another kind of Korean age, maybe to add to the foreign exoticness so people are likely to read things in which it's mentioned

Then we have the actual 'Korean Age', although calling it the Korean version of the northern sinoshperic age is probably more accurate sine similar systems are used in Mongolia and china. I think my mum said her father said something similar about counting his age in Ewe culture, but the younger generation of Ewe's don't seem to be keeping up with the knowledge. The Korean version is to count age from conception, but always round the first 9 months up to a year. To distinguish between Age counted from birth and counted from conception, I use the term lifetime or real age for the count from conception or gestation, however this fundamentally will be an estimate with at least two-week margin of error. So Korean Age could be called Korean Rounded Real Age.

Considering as the date
876.55:12:09:02:07:2023
corresponds to the time
2022:06:01:08:11:54.567

I see no sense in mixing date and time like we do

A lot of the ambiguity in society is absolutely on purpose, as it makes communication between those in the lower power strata more difficult and forces them to rely on higher-ups.

The idea that Korean age is based on time of conception rounded up is just one theory. The actual origin is unclear.

The explanation I gave of 1-based counting (eg. "this is the *1st* year I am alive") is a different theory, which makes more logical sense to me.

Here is an article that gives some additional explanation: https://overseas.mofa.go.kr/no-en/brd/m ... uary%201st.



Anyway, whatever the true origins are, calling it an "age" doesn't jive well with the concept we use for age in the west. Now, the system's updated to be consistent with most of the rest of the world.

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be immersed

It is a mistake to think of Korea as unique in this regard, when it is simply making a small variation on a much bigger and widely used system. The only thing that is really special is that they are now formalising a change to the international system, and even that started in some areas of life some 50 years ago. I believe that the impetus was the risk, highlighted by the Covid pandemic. of giving vaccinations to people in the wrong age category (to medical eyes). The Japanese changed over in Meiji times, and the Chinese started changing over in Republican times and the Communists completed the process. I believe in both cases they did this off the own bat, without pressure from the West, so they presumably had themselves felt the old system had disadvantages.

Despite any putative disadvantages, Vietnam and Taiwan still make much use of the traditional system, and it is not entirely dead even in the other countries of that area. Or even in the West - the Chinese New Year is still celebrated even overseas in accordance with the old calendar.

But the real point here surely is how this impacts on go. It is still normal in Japan to cite old go records using the traditional date, which just happens to look like the way modern dates are given But these dates have to be converted to western dates when we translate. The GoGoD practice is to give both dates in the form "1852-06-24,29 {Kaei 5 V 7,12}", using Roman numerals to indicate lunar months. I cite this example for a reason. A new version of a known game involving Honinbo Shusaku recently came to light in the papers of Nakagawa Junsetsu (he made lots of copies of games in his own hand), and since it has extra moves it is more likely to be correct than the previously known version. But when this discovery was being written about, the date cited in the modern newspaper was the old lunar date (i.e. as 1852-5-7). This is normal in Japan. It is not a problem in China because old Chinese game records almost never have any days attached. Koreans don't have old go records and they use the western date system even when they count ages in the oriental fashion.

Another problem is that Japan and China still quote biographies of old players using the old oriental ages, so a prodigy may be even more prodigious as he sounds if he 10 by our count rather than 12 by their count.

A new problem is emerging in Japan. I have noticed an increase in the use of a pseudo-western system, so that we get 23年 instead of Reiwa 5 for the current year. But being Japanese, they freely use both systems together, and if they happen to refer back to the Showa era in the same text, it's easy to think 23年 refers to 1948.

It is also important not to feel too superior about our own system. There are abuses such as women inducing an early birth to get a child into a different school year. There are complications with the 29th February. Not all old dates in our history correspond to Gregorian dates. Then there's the perennial problem of Americans writing 10-06 for 10th June when most other people in the English-speaking world take it as 6th October - a quirk that has featured in some films, tv series and detective novels. I even heard from an lady last week that she (very understandably) went for a 6 o'clock plane 12 hours late, and I have mentioned before here that "clockwise" is no longer an entirely intuitive notion for many young people who can only tell the time with their iPhones.

Stephen Hawking missed these and many other aspects of time out of his Brief History of Time.

I agree with most of the stuff said here, though, I don't find it common for Americans to automatically interpret 10-06 as the 10th of June. There are different date for interpretations for sure, but my first instinct as an American is to think of 10-06 as October 6th.

That being said, I think that a June 10th interpretation can be logically consistent, since including the year usually puts the year at the end (so interpreting the first number as a day of the month makes the sequence more specific to more general).

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be immersed

I positively despise the urgency to conform that's gotten into every single official discourse, without the slightest time.to say... "Okay, wait; this doesn't make sense." This is going to bite us in the rear.



Oh, if they're using a phone, it's easy. 'Clockwise' matches the turn of the dial.

Take care.

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一碁一会