(I posted this on Twitter and Lifehacker, I just thought I'd bring some controversy here too. }:))
2010 is not the start of a new decade. 2011 is.
(Knowing that a)there was no year 0, b)a decade refers to a period of 10 years after a multiple of 10 years, starting from year 1, and c)that this statement is only applicable in real math.)
This is further explained in Zero by Charles Seife. Essentially:
- There is no year 0.
- 10 years after year 1 is year 11.
- New centuries, decade, millennia, etc. end in 1.
Appropriate comic: Indexed
(Yes, I have YAMDBIBS.)
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Yeah, there is?
What year would you call the first month ever?
Would you call a new born baby? 1 years old?
2001 was the new millennium.
!!
digitxp is seriously poisoning your mind.
Edit: O.M.G. Your avvy is blinking at me... in a strange, creepy kind of way.
My website would poison your mind more :P.
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The Gregorian calendar (the one we use everyday) starts with year 0, because the guy who invented it (some random guy) didn't know about year zero yet. Link
But we are smarter than them, and now we know about zero. But we never actually say it. When a baby is 0 years old, we say they're n minutes/months/days/weeks old.
Technically there is no first month, because time is infinite.
Oh, and BTW that same guy thought Jesus was born on year 1, but then it was later discovered that Jesus was supposedly born in 4 BC, which breaks things up. For example, a guy who was born in 50 BC and died in 50 AD lived for 99 years, not 100--because there was no year zero.
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Starting at zero isn't so bad. We do it all the time in computer science.
But the morons who made the Gregorian calendar didn't even know it existed.
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*Sensing ridiculous thread coming*
MOD!!! Over here!! Just kidding...
Seriously, I like gluxon's logic - except the millennium part.
"The question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."
Be quiet
Interesting ideas, but incorrect.
Decade refers to the tens decimal place in the year. The 1970s, for example, started in 1970 and ended in 1979. They did not run from 1971 to 1980, because 1980 was the first year of the 1980s. We call them the '70s and the '80s because they have a 7 and 8 in the tens place in the year.
Millennium means the thousandths place. 1999 was the last year of the last one and 2000 was the first year of the current one because the thousandths place incremented.
This Year Zero concept is entirely beside the point. It's just the metric system, and there's no two ways about it. The metric system is not open to interpretation, and it wouldn't be an effective system of measurements if it were. No offense, but suggesting otherwise because of some clever wording is like saying the earth is flat. You can use some clever words to justify that as well, but it'll never make it so because it's just not.
Besides, conspiracy theories are best left to stuff involving people, e.g. the JFK assassination. Not science. It's like global warming. Now there's some controversy.
I stated that I was assuming that a decade is a period of 10 years beginning a multiple of 10 years after year 1, the first year.
I hope this thread lasts a while, it's the perfect way to wind down, now that I have mid-terms in more than just math. 8-)
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But this isn't. Now if you made that stipulation, then yes, you'd be correct.
Here's the problem. We have negative years but we don't have a zero year, though some say we do. That doesn't really make sense. Why do we arbitrarily start counting on the year of Christ's birth or death (I forget which). But it matters not -- we're roughly two millennia past that into four-digit years. A year is the ones place (a fact I think we're all in agreement on?), a decade is the tens place, century is the hundreds place, and millennium is the thousands place. (I incorrectly said 'thousandths' before, that was the wrong word.)
People for whatever reason feel the need to start counting at one, but that isn't the way the decimal system works. It makes sense when you're just looking at 1-10. Kids are taught to count to ten, so we grow up thinking one is low and ten is high. Truthfully, any number can have any number of zeros appended to the left. 01=1=001. So 01-10 still looks okay, but 00-09 is the correct expression of the first ten numbers. Without one you have zero, which is a logically quantifiable amount. If you discard zero, what do you get when you take one from one? Or X from X, to be more algebraically correct.
Debatable debates are good, and I can go all day on some debates. It's a shame John doesn't want this forum to go that way, but I completely understand. The only problem with Internet debates is it's hard to get in. You come into an established debate and it runs on for ten pages, and all the points you wanted to make get taken, so you compromise, which makes you look weak (on top of being a newbie) and as the sides are already drawn, the opposing side tears you up, and "your side" doesn't help because they have their own battles to fight (and for all they know, you could be a strawman sockpuppet). So it's a mess.
As I said, the jerk who made the Gregorian calendar did not know of such things as 0. We are descendants of that jerk, so we still count off from one (mainly because it doesn't make sense to have 0 as the 1st #). If he wasn't a jerk (or if we'd stop being jerks and just revise the Gregorian calendar) then 2010 would be a new decade. Back then, they never pondered over such "impossible" things--since they didn't know what x minus x was, they labeled it undefined.
Christ's birth (supposedly) turned out to be 4 BC, not 1 AD, which caused a lot of controversy back then.
Google Search => debate.org I'm not going. How about you?
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for explaining this:
Okay, I'm starting to see digitxp's side. The calendar does indeed start on year 1, which makes it logical that 2011 would be the next decade though.
I checked wikipedia on both decades and years. It actually looks like digitxp is using evidence from the decades article, and Nathan is using evidence from the years article.
A decade does not refer to 10 years. It refers to the earth spinning around the solar system 10 times. The time in which we started the count on it was in year one.
Believe it or not, but this matter is an opinion. Nothing would be messed up if the world aggreed to change the first year from 1 to 0.
We could say that decades were started 1 year before we started counting, nothing would change. Nothing here is fact, because we can't find it.
No matter what way we look at it, if somebody was born on 1850 and died on 1950, he did indeed live 100 years, not 99.
I aggree though, time is infinite, but years are not. The first earth year started when the earth was born. This is different when you happen to visit neptune for a vacation. When we one day visit another planet with intellectual beings, we'll be dissaggreeing on the matter of time. The world needs a better way to keep track of time. Possibly to not count time with years, since it refers to the earth spinning, but with another metric time unit, specifically created for time, not two things.
I state my logic again, decades starting positions are an opinion on earth. We aren't advaced enough to figure out EXACTLY when earth years started, and what year we're really in. The only way to find out would have to be if we created a time machine and used it to see when the earth was created. It's possible that small evidence still exists ON earth, but the chances of humans finding it are near zero. (Not One :P)
P.S. I lost half of this content due to PortableApps.com being offline during 1-4-2010, 1:00 A.M. -5 GMT.
Contradictory. Actually the very first sentence in the Wikipedia article on "Decade" -- since you brought up Wikipedia, I decided to look (I was going on common sense, not Wikipedia) -- is "A decade is a period of ten years." That article shortly later states that "Although any period of ten years is a decade, a convenient and frequently referenced interval is based on the tens digit of the calendar year, as in using 1960s to represent the decade from 1960 to 1969."
In short, it states that a decade is ten years, and while it can be any ten years, it's generally used to refer to the tens place, as I said.
Unless he was born on December 31 and died on January 1, in which case he lived, what? (my math hat is out of reach and I am feeling lazy) 99 years and a day? Two?
No we won't. If I were to call my brother in California and ask him the time, he'd say it's about 10:30pm Sunday night. But it's almost 1:30am Monday morning here in NC. Who's right? We're both right because we'd both be stating the correct time where we stand. If we were to travel to another planet, their time would be in effect. It would not matter what time it was where we come from.
I'm not fully convinced it's a matter of opinion, because by definition, by the metric system, the decade refers to the tens place. I will accept however that it is not the only valid way to count, just the most logical.
The calendar was created by Man -- and Hallmark. It's by the calendar of today we live. Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, weekdays, weekends, appointments, and events. What makes negative years negative? What makes Year One so special? All of that is in the past, and nobody alive today was alive then. Events then are documented badly, if at all, and it's all open to interpretation because it's during Biblical times. What we have now is what we are now, and what we have now is a metric system that says you have to count this way.
The years (which is known as the Gregorian calendar) is not metric :P.
Year One isn't special, just as Christmas isn't (as I said, people supposedly put Christmas near Winter Solstice so that other people would stop celebrating Winter Solstice). It used to be special--until people changed their mind and said Christ was born in 4 BC. This is why I HATE religion. It's so open to debate, and everybody has different opinions, and on top of it, there's no real evidence!
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Perhaps, but the measurements are. When you say decade or century, you're using metric measurements. The cent- prefix means 100; the dec- prefix means 10.
No, it wasn't. Wife liked it though. Too much silly, too little substance. And I'm not a Jack Black fan. (Plus, there was a promise of Olivia Wilde -- Thirteen on House -- in next to nothing from a friend of my wife's, that went unfulfilled.)
OK, the decades debate's not going anywhere. I say you can't argue with the metric system, digitxp is talking about Year Zero and Year One.
Here's another topic along the same lines, and equally as fun to debate, I should think: Do we call this year "Two thousand ten" (or "Two thousand and ten") or "Twenty ten"?
"Twenty-ten" sure rolls off the tongue smoother, and the last several centuries followed this. We didn't say "Ninteen hundred and sixty-nine" (although, formally, yes we did, that exactly (more commonly "In the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty-nine")), we said "Nineteen sixty-nine", so we should say "Twenty ten", even though we called the last year "Two thousand nine".
But I disagree. Despite how we treated the 1900s and previous centuries, I think "Twenty ten" sounds sloppy and when I hear somebody say it. "Two thousand ten" is proper and does not take longer to say.
This is entirely open to opinion, however. What's yours?
I'm going to say TooKayTen. It rolls in the tongue, not too sloppy, and when written out, it takes 4 digits. Oh, and the 2k geek factor tops the cake 8-).
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If you get a five-year warranty on a household appliance, it is from the date of purchase. If it breaks in December, five years and six months after you bought it, you can't bring a calendar to the store to demonstrate that the sixth year hasn't started yet.
A decade can start whenever you decide. If you want it to be relative to the birth of Christ, then the 20th century spanned 1901 to 2001. If you want a decade to represent an arbitrary ten-year period of time, you can do that too.
EDIT: To the beginning of 2001, that is.
I just can't get involved in this thread... religion, mathematics, it's a nightmare and I'll just up end getting frustrated and calling people names.