Is it the true end of a decade tonight or was it last year

[The Halk]

Random question related to this, why do we celebrate a new year on the current 1st day of January, not the 22 of December?

Ie why is the shortest day not classed as new years eve?

Pope Gregory the whatever (not even his real name) decided it.

There used to be a festival celebrating the winter solstice, which the papacy usurped as christmas, that was probably the end of year/shortest day.

 

[craptakular]

I'm going to party like it's 1983, by playing on my ps3.

 

[The Halk]

Yep, mate called off his party - the weans ill - and plan b has fallen apart. So I'm going to stay in for a change. Can't be doing with a substandard hogmanay party, so none at all for old Halk.

 

[Six6siX]

Does this mean I was actually born a year later or earlier than it says on my birth certificate?

 

[Burnsy2023]

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

Sorry to bump the thread, but this seems pretty applicable:

Timekeeping
A belief that decades/centuries/millennia begin not on the year ending in 0, but rather on the subsequent year ending in 1 (e.g., "The current millennium didn't really begin on January 1, 2000, but rather on January 1, 2001") -- based on an assumption that there was no year 0 -- are founded in an incomplete understanding of historical calculation. The currently dominant system of numbering years, known as the "Anno Domini" or "Common Era" system, was proposed by Dionysius Exiguus in 525 for application to the Julian Calendar (and later was applied to the Gregorian Calendar).[27] For this reason, all year numbers prior to 525 are the result of calculation rather than historical record. Two systems of calculation exist in parallel: The Historical System, which holds that 1 AD/CE was preceded by 1 BC/BCE, and the Astronomical System, which incorporates a year 0, and thus has 1 AD/CE preceded by 0.[28] With scholarly works in which precision is important in BC/BCE years, it is necessary for the researcher to identify which system of calculation is being used. The Astronomical System (with a year 0) is actually more common, and is endorsed in ISO 8601, which deals with representation of dates and times.[29]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

Courtesy of XKCD.

 

[PMKeates]

Something important to recall is the definition of the word 'decade' in the foremost reference of our language, the Oxford Dictionary:

• a period of ten years.
• a period of ten years beginning with a year ending in 0.

Therefore, for one to reference a 'decade' you are referring to either 10 sequential years generically, or if in terms of the commonly accepted calendar decade, a period of ten years beginning with a year ending in 0 i.e. 2010 is the beginning of the current decade.

The semantics about the start of the calendar are irrelevant - if the calendar started in 1 AD rather than 0, then it started in the year 2 of that decade when calculated retrospectively.