Quick question: What years consist of the 21st century? (1 Viewer)

[Ralph_G]

reminds me of another conversation:

Riggs: Goddammit, you were supposed to come on three! Where were you?
Murtaugh: I thought you meant one, two, three, then go!
Riggs: No, no, on three! We always go on three!

 

[Cees Alons]

...did you know that in the U.S. you generally (perhaps always, but I can't say since I've not been in them all) will not find a floor 13. The floors go straight from 12 to 14.

Doesn't that support my view?


Cees

 

[Glenn Overholt]

Here's my nickel. We went from -1 to +1(AD) because 0(zero) is not a number. It is just a place holder. (I learned that in math).

Glenn

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

1) A.D. stands for Anno Domine, "The year of our Lord". The first year of our Lord was understood (by those who crafted the calendar) to be the year in which Jesus was born. It doesn't matter if he was born on December 31st, the entire year in which he was born is designated "1 A.D." which automatically makes the previous year "1 B.C." You can't have Christ born in "1 B.C." since by definition the year in which he was born is not before he was born. The designation is based on an entire year, not on a moment in time. When Christ was actually born (that is how "accurate" the original estimate was) doesn't matter at all. It is an arbitrary calendar (like all calendars) kept around because of its utility and divorced from its religious origins.

Lots of tinkering has taken place with and within the calendar without people getting too bent out of shape. In Europe March, not January, marked the beginning of the year for a very long time. (It does sort of make sense to have the year start with the new season of growth, spring, rather than in the dead of winter.) That's why the numeric month names don't match the current calendar. (September comes from a root meaning "seven", October "eight", November "nine" and December "ten" - which makes perfect sense if the year begins in March, but a January start leaves us with a 12th month called "Ten". ) American Presidents used to be inaugurated in March as a deliberate echo of this old Roman tradition. (The Founders conciously modelled a good deal of the American polity on what they knew of the old Roman Republic - although by late Republican times the start of the year had been moved back to January and the consuls were inaugurated on New Year's Day.)

The Romans used a lunar calendar, and the lunar cycle does not match the solar year, so the religious authorities kept having to insert extras days, sometimes whole extra months, into the year to keep the seasons in sync with the months. Sometimes those in charge were too lazy to do this and Roman armies would find themselves fighting through blizards in what the calendar said were summer months.

Of course, the Romans didn't number their years (instead keeping track by the who consuls were - "In year of the first Consulship of Marcus Licinius Crassus and Gauis Pompeius Magnus", for instance) or even their days. Rather they used a "week" of ten days called a market interval, and kept track of individual days by counting forward and backwards from three days within each month - the Nones (which I think was the first) the Ides (the middle) and the Calends (which I think was the last, and which obviously gives us the word "calendar") So I wouldn't say, "The meeting will be held on November 12th", but rather, "The meeting will be held three days before the ides of November".

Julius Caesar tried to straighten things out by importing a solar calendar from Egypt, and that worked for quite a long time, but the failure to account properly for leap years introduced "drift" over longer periods of time, and Pope Gregory commissioned astronomers to revise the Julian system. The accepted dates for most historical events are based on this revision, so that texts will say that a battle was fought on "October 25th 110 B.C." even though contemporary accounts will call it September 15th.

Point being that it is all rather arbitrary, excepting that we like our calendar to coincide with Earth's journey around the Sun, and hence the seasons, and that we should just deal with the workable system that we've been given. Which is not at all confusing if you apply a little logic and common sense, and stop trying to impose your own arbitrary standards, feelings and theories on it.

2) American buidings count the ground floor of a building as the "first" floor. The first floor above ground level is the "second" floor. (Although some individual buildings may designate the firt floor as "Lobby" with an "L" for the elevator button, the floor above it will still have a button marked "2".) Given the persistance of superstition, most U.S. buildings lack a floor designated "13" - the elevator buttons skip from 12 to 14.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Ken Chan]

from the moment you press start until it hits 1 second you call that the first second, not the 0th. Do you see that our calendar is no different?

You are completely missing the point that there are two different sets of numbers here, the ordinal and the cardinal. If you can't see that, it's no wonder we're getting nowhere.

The first second is also "second number zero". If you're timing something that takes a half-second and you write it down, the zero is in there: 00:00:00.5 -- in fact, as you can see, there are plenty of zeroes in there (and no ones).

If you want to argue that the calendar is "no different" -- I would say there are some differences, but for the sake of argument, we'll go your way -- we could very easily have the first year be labeled year number zero. Stopwatches are not labeled "1st second", "2nd second", "3rd second"; that's not how digital stopwatches display the time.

//Ken