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From: Trevor J. Kenchington (no email)
Date: Mon Oct 18 2004 - 16:24:09 EDT
Gordon Talge suggested:
> Now let's all really confuse ourselves. Was 2000
> the first year of the 21st century or the last year of
> the 20th?
As a born pedant (and at least a second-generation born pedant at that),
I have always held that the 21st century and the 3rd millennium began
with the year 2001. However, back at the time, one adversary pointed out
that common convention recognized the decade of the '60s as running from
1960 to 1969 (and similarly for other decades), without anyone like me
objecting that it should be 1961 to 1970. Thus, we had given away our
position and should recognize that modern usage has the century running
from 1900 to 1999. I still held my millennial celebration, such as it
was, a year after the big fuss but I had to recognize the opposing logic.
Besides, if we were to base the argument on the absence of any Year 0,
we would probably need to ask which day started Year 1. I doubt that it
was January 1st. The English didn't use that for the start of the
calendar year until the mid-18th century and I suspect that, before the
change, they were following the Julian calendar, which was the operative
one when the concept of Anno Domine was developed.
Gordon also noted:
> BTW, on the time thing, I always thought that
> 23h 59m 59s was say Sunday, and 00h 00m 00s
> was Monday.
Surely, if 23:59:59 is Sunday then so is 23:59:59.999999 but
00:00:00.000001 is Monday. 00:00:00.00000(recurring), however, is an
infinitely-narrow instant of time which separates Sunday from Monday and
is not part of either, just as noon is neither AM nor PM.
Of course, if you use "0:00:00" to denote the interval of time from
0:00:00.00000(recurring) to 0:00:00:99999(recurring), then it is part of
Monday.
One of the distressing things about time is that a unit of it, once
measured, is gone for good and will never return. A unit of time
expended in the measurement of that unit is time that will never be
available to you for any other purpose. Which is probably a good
argument for not expending too much of it on discussions of how to
define the units!
Or maybe I am just feeling my age and the drawing in of the years.
Trevor Kenchington
--
Trevor J. Kenchington PhD
Gadus Associates, Office(902) 889-9250
R.R.#1, Musquodoboit Harbour, Fax (902) 889-9251
Nova Scotia B0J 2L0, CANADA Home (902) 889-3555
Science Serving the Fisheries
http://home.istar.ca/~gadus
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