Date: Sun, 5 Dec 1999 18:02:39 -0500 (EST) From: jack <jack@germanium.xtalwind.net> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: New Millenium (was: So, what do we call the 00's?) Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.9912051414240.40078-100000@germanium.xtalwind.net> In-Reply-To: <19991205135905.63795@mojave.sitaranetworks.com>
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Today Greg Lehey wrote:
> OK. I've come to generally accept this opinion. Let's look at a few
> more:
>
> When is the turn of the century? By the same logic, that's also in
> 2001.
Yes it is.
By definition a century is 100 years; any 100 years.
A person born in 1900, who lives to be 100, will celebrate their
first century (100 years) on their birthday in 2000.
A person born in 1901, who lives to be 100, will celebrate their
first century (100 years) on their birthday in 2001.
The "birth date" of the Gregorian calander was Jan 1 1, not
Jan 1 0, so its one hundredth "birthday" (the end of its first
century) was Jan 1 101. Its 2000th birthday (the end of its
twentieth century) will be Jan 1 2001.
> When is the beginning of the next decade? By the same logic, that's
> also in 2001.
That is also correct.
A decade is ten years; any ten years. The decade of "the
nineties" is from 1990 though 1999. In this case we count the
"zero year" as there was a year 1990, IIRC. My first decade was
from my birth in Jun 1951 through my tenth birthday in June 1961.
The ten years from 1 through 10 inclusive were the common era's
first decade, not 0 to 9 since the calendar wasn't "born" until
year 1. The second decade of the common era started Jan 1 of the
year 11. Jan 1 2001 marks the end of the two hundredth decade of
the Gregorian calander.
> How much is a billion? Look up any non-American dictionary more than
> 40 years old, and you'll find it's 1,000,000,000,000. American usage
> has prevailed even in English-speaking countries, but in German or
> French (and, I suspect, in most other European languages), it's still
> 1,000,000,000,000.
American _everything_ is always different than the rest of the
world. :)
On a page entitled Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of
Mathematics I found
Billion first occurs, with the meaning 10^12, in French in 1484
in Le Triparty en la Science des Nombres by Nicolas Chuquet
(1445?-1500?). He used the words byllion, tryllion, quadrillion,
quyllion, sixlion, septyllion, ottyllion, and nonyllion. A
translation has: "The first dot indicates million, the second dot
billion, the third dot trillion, the fourth dot quadrillion...and
so on as far as one may wish to go."
The translation seem to indicate that he considered a million to
be 10^9.
Ghaligai wrote that Maestro Paulo da Pisa stated "La settima dice
numero di milione" (read the seventh order as millions). Smith
(History of Mathematics vol. 2, page 81) writes that this Paulo
may have been Paolo Dagomari (b. 1281; d., 1365 or 1374).
So it seems we Americans took Chuquet's "The first dot indicates
million, the second dot billion..." and applied it to Paulo's
"read the seventh order as millions".
Not much different than the concept of taco pizza. :)
From a truly logical/scientific viewpoint, if you define a year
as one revolution of the earth around the sun then this would be
the ~4.5 [Paulo]millionth millenium.
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