Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: The New Decade Message-ID: <2437@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 27 Dec 89 16:52:01 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Reply-To: Brian Kantor Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd. Lines: 30 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 9, Issue 597, message 8 of 8 >by Bonnie Guiton > 1990 begins a new decade .... No it doesn't; the new decade doesn't start until 1991. [Moderator's Note: If there is anything that can provoke as many or more replies than Caller*ID or my messages on His Honor, it would have to be the every-tenth-year debate on 'when does the new decade start?'. The theory is, since we did not have a year *named* Zero, the first decade was the years 1 through 10; the second was 11 through 20.....the 199th is the years 1981 through 1990. But this overlooks the fact that even though we did not refer to the year before year one as year zero *we still had a chronological year pass by*. Some people say we went immediatly from the year 1 BC to the year 1 AD; but I would remind you that in the 'BC years' the people did *not* think of the year in those terms; they called it by some number or name, but 'BC' was not part of the title. Many scholars believe that the person for whom the renumbering was done, whose birthday was celebrated a few days ago, was born in the year 4 BC....in other words, four years *before he was born*....so calendar mixups are not unheard of; witness the fiasco a few hundred years ago when several days had to be dropped from one year to compensate for extra leap year days which had been inserted in error; and the fact that in the colonies, we defied the old world, and refused to change our calendar for several more years. So why don't we bite the bullet and admit that the early days of our present year numbering system were not without some flaws in the methodology, write off the missing zeroeth year and celebrate a new decade this weekend. PT]