Date: Sat, 4 Dec 1999 13:01:53 -0500 (EST) From: "Crist J. Clark" <cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> To: mark@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org (Mark Ovens) Cc: ken@kdm.org (Kenneth D. Merry), dg@root.com, adam@whizkidtech.net (G. Adam Stanislav), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: So, what do we call the 00's? Message-ID: <199912041801.NAA45990@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> In-Reply-To: <19991204111841.B319@marder-1> from Mark Ovens at "Dec 4, 1999 11:18:41 am"
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Mark Ovens wrote, > On Sat, Dec 04, 1999 at 12:42:55AM -0700, Kenneth D. Merry wrote: > > David Greenman wrote... > > > >G. Adam Stanislav wrote... > > > >> At 15:20 03-12-1999 -0700, Kenneth D. Merry wrote: > > > >> >> not expect anything to happen throughout the year 2000. > > > >> >> Or, that I was the only one who knows that Y2K = year 2048. > > > >> > > > > >> >Don't you mean 2049? :) > > > >> > > > >> No, I don't. Unless they changed powers of 2 and I missed it. :-) > > > > > > > >Just as the new millennium starts in 2001 because the years were > > > >numbered starting at 1 (1 + 2000 == 2001), 1 + 2048 == 2049. > > > > > > I've heard this argument before (about years starting at 1), but I > > > think it is wrong. The calander is supposedly based on the > > > birthdate of Christ. People don't start out being one year old, so > > > although there was no 'year 0', the time before the first full > > > year would have been measured in smaller units like months and > > > days. If this is the case, then the year 2000 would be the start > > > of the next millenium. > > > > The calendar skips from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D. There's no zero year. So > > the year before the first full year A.D. was 1 B.C. > > > > Although it is roughly based on the birth of Christ, for whatever > > reason they decided to start numbering at 1 instead of 0. > > > > Because counting from 1 is convention, its only "purists" like > programmers, mathematicians etc who count from 0. When you are taught > to count at school it's from 1 to 10, not 0 to 9. There are times when counting from 0 is the common usage. For example, people count hours of the day (on a 24 hour clock) from 00. For whatever reason, people who think the third millennium starts at the 1999-2000 rollover don't also believe that you should call the first hour after midnight on the 31st "1", and then party when the clock goes from 23rd to 24th hour (at 11 PM) which is how they are counting years. All of that aside, we all know deep down that this is all meaningless. It next year it will have been 2000 years since... since... well, it's 2000 years past a point that a monk came up with in a miscalculation about 1500 years ago. And what's so special about 2000? 2000 = 2^4 * 5^3. Oooh... shivers. In the end, the fact that the thousands place is rolling over on the Common Era year is as much of a reason to party as 2000 years passing since the beginning of the CE. Some people don't realize that they occur at two different times, but that just means they lose out on an extra excuse to get excited about nothing. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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