It's a head-slapper when my students are, say, counting cycles for a mass on a spring and they let go of the mass and say "one!" Or in a basketball game when someone has 5 seconds to inbound the ball and the ref says "you have 5 seconds... one! Two!..." and then STOP AT 5. It's so common to just cut off that first second. I did notice, though, in an NFL game, referees *do* take zero into account when looking at the play clock. If it's 40 seconds, then the interpretation is that it's 40.0 when you start it, so 0.1 seconds later it immediately shows 39 (truncating the 0.9). So when the clock first shows zero, it's really 0.9, and even though the crowd goes nuts they won't throw a flag until an estimated second later. Thank goodness that 0.1-second precision is there for basketball clocks!
Yeah, once you get that off-by-one errors aren't limited to programming, you start to see them all over the place!
> even though the crowd goes nuts they won't throw a flag until an estimated second later.
That's really interesting. I have appreciated the 0.1-second precision in NBA clocks, but I haven't paid attention to the lack of it in other sports. Have you ever seen an argument about refs throwing that flag too early or too late in the NFL?
I should clarify that I stopped paying attention to pro sports a year or two after moving to Alaska. :)
Yeah, I hadn't paid much attention until an announcer brought it up because the play clock was showing zero and yet a flag wasn't thrown -- it's sort of up to the ref's judgement when that last second expires.
It's a head-slapper when my students are, say, counting cycles for a mass on a spring and they let go of the mass and say "one!" Or in a basketball game when someone has 5 seconds to inbound the ball and the ref says "you have 5 seconds... one! Two!..." and then STOP AT 5. It's so common to just cut off that first second. I did notice, though, in an NFL game, referees *do* take zero into account when looking at the play clock. If it's 40 seconds, then the interpretation is that it's 40.0 when you start it, so 0.1 seconds later it immediately shows 39 (truncating the 0.9). So when the clock first shows zero, it's really 0.9, and even though the crowd goes nuts they won't throw a flag until an estimated second later. Thank goodness that 0.1-second precision is there for basketball clocks!
Yeah, once you get that off-by-one errors aren't limited to programming, you start to see them all over the place!
> even though the crowd goes nuts they won't throw a flag until an estimated second later.
That's really interesting. I have appreciated the 0.1-second precision in NBA clocks, but I haven't paid attention to the lack of it in other sports. Have you ever seen an argument about refs throwing that flag too early or too late in the NFL?
I should clarify that I stopped paying attention to pro sports a year or two after moving to Alaska. :)
Yeah, I hadn't paid much attention until an announcer brought it up because the play clock was showing zero and yet a flag wasn't thrown -- it's sort of up to the ref's judgement when that last second expires.
That's an interestingly objective thing to leave to a ref's judgement.