Moved from The BBQ Pit to Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share.
Gfactor
Pit Moderator
That’s going to make all the name calling a bit problematic.
I meant, Dec 31 1999.
However now that I can’t sulk and call people names any more, I’ve lost interest in the topic. It’s been dissected endlessly elsewhere anyway.
We can zombie it again when the next moron tries to pretend “the decade” is just starting Jan 1, 2011.
The masses have decided all sorts of stuff that they were absolutely wrong about.
Indeed, and they were proven wrong scientifically or mathematically. When the day/week/month/year/decade/millennium changes is not a scientific nor a mathematical question, but a semantic question. And the masses have never decided any semantic issue incorrectly; the very idea is incoherent.
Incidentally, the idea of a conceptual year zero is unproblematic, just like the idea of ground zero is unproblematic, or the marking of a zero on a ruler is unproblematic. Which brings up for me a related point: I teach kids how to use a ruler, and I have to train a lot of them not to start measuring at the one-inch mark. I have to show them that you start your measurements at zero.
I think that applies here. The idea of a year zero is totally fine. After December 31 in year zero (assuming we arbitrarily set this year to zero), it’ll be January 1 in year 1. Where’s the problem?
Indeed, it makes things a little easier: if there’s a year zero, then there are two years between January 1, 1 BCE and January 1, 1 CE, corresponding to what we’d expect. If there’s no year zero, then there’s just one year between the two.
That’s not such an issue. But year zero means that 100 BCE and 100 CE are 200 years apart; no year zero means they’re 199 years apart, which gets a little confusing.
It depends on what you mean by “199 years apart”. How many years apart are 2009 and 2010? Well, the end of 2009 is the same instant as that start of 2010, so you could say they are zero years apart. On the other hand, the start of 2009 was 2 years before the end of 2010, so the maximum time period they cover is 2 years.
With 100 BCE and 100 CE, the start of 100 BCE (which was the start of the 1st century BCE) was 200 years before the end of 100 CE (which was the end of the 1st century CE). So they are 200 years apart, in that sense. In another, they are just 198 years apart.
The zero point is midnight on December 31 in 1 BC, which was also the start of January 1 in 1 AD. So each year was the first year going from that zero point – meaning that all through that year people were less than 1 year from 0. Similarly, all through this year we will more that 2009 years but less than 2010 years from the zero point: that’s what being in the 2010st year of the Common Era means.