Soldato
So what's the name of the decade then that finishes tonight.
The decade of the overclocker of course.
Is it the true end of a decade tonight or was it last year
- Thread starter Liquid_Entity
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The decade of the overclocker of course.
2000-2010 is 11 years you burk.
Based on the Gregorian calendar, a decade starts on the '1' year, so this decade was 2001-2010. A new decade starts tomorrow.
However most people tend to ignore this and go with 0-9.
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oops sorry for opening a can of worms. haha
Complicated question. Actually tonight we change decade, pretty much the same way we actually changed millennium in 2001 and not in 2000.
The reason is very simple. When we moved on to the new calendar we started counting years from 1. There was never year 0. So if you start counting from 1 then you complete 10 digits if you include 10 itself. So a decade as you guessed it spans from 1 to 10.
Things get complicated when you consider the consequences. Astronomers for example, actually use year 0 to compensate for this so their numbering system for years is not the same as the Gregorian calendar. The problem is not simple semantics unfortunately and it cocks things up for many scientists who have to consider absolute time.
So by the calendar we currently use, the decade is changing tonight. In terms of absolute years it changed in 09. So basically the average Joe is actually celebrating in terms of absolute years while thinking that he is celebrating in terms of Gregorian calendar.
Good Post
Associate
i dont get why you you dont count year 0 lol, it still had january to december and everyone was very much alive so it still counts as a year.
Don
There was never a year 0, it went 1BC to 1AD.
Associate
it just sounds ignorant personally, not of you, but how they disregard what was before year one, or are you saying it literally started at year one, that year one is what im thinking should be year 0, that would make sense.
yep this.
it is why there is a difference in absolute time and the gregorian calendar if you read a few posts up
Associate
Think about when you are born, you are measured in hours, weeks, then months. You don't turn 1 year until 365 days later.
Our calendar though started not at 0 but at 1AD. If you count in decades since the start of AD, they al start at 1 (1,11,21,31,41,51,61,71 etc....)
So yes, the decade this year stops tonight.
You can't really have a 0, if you think of why we have AD and BC. 0 would be no mans land for either.
I don't see why not. The first year of your life you are aged zero, and for BC, if we take it literally, for the whole of the first year before, zero years and x months would be left before christ.
This man understands numbers where as most people don't really understand. Its like watching people convert mm to m.
I don't think I've met anyone who can't convert mm to m.
this comes from AD years starting at 1 AD onwards
ISO has 1BC as zero so it is also valid to claim the end of the millennium was the end of 1999 as everyone generally assumes.
If you insist on sticking rigidly to the calendar system invented by people with no concept of zero then yes the end of the millennium was indeed at the end of 2000.
Makes more sense IMO to accept a system with 0 and define 1BC as year 0000 as per ISO 8601
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
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Soldato
Indeed
Soldato
I think I'm going to join the "new decade started last year" crowd, as 1980-1989 was clearly the '80s et al. No other year can qualify as such.
Of course, with regards to centuries or millenia, that all changes. We started the 3rd millenia in 2001, not 2000. Buck Rogers came back in the 25th century, year 2491. I'm a hypocrite.
Of course, with regards to centuries or millenia, that all changes. We started the 3rd millenia in 2001, not 2000. Buck Rogers came back in the 25th century, year 2491. I'm a hypocrite.
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Soldato
Of course the calendar itself is pretty much arbitrary, and so it'd be just as valid to celebrate the end of "the" decade in 2012 if you wanted to. Unless you're Christian, there's nothing special about the year 1 of the Gregorian calendar, and neither is there anything particularly special about the base 10 number system that we use. Why not celebrate the passing of every 6 years instead?
Cheers for the link, didn't know about that, but I agree entirely.
The fact is, we celebrate the numbers going up, and it makes much more sense to view the decades as 198x, 199x, 200x, 201x, etc.
