3 ms·

Sorry but no. "It began on January 1, 2001, and ends on December 31, 2100" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_centu

Sorry but no. "It began on January 1, 2001, and ends on December 31, 2100" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century

gumby 6y ago
Isn't that what crispyambulance said (or perhaps a few hours before)?
- sheepdestroyer 6y ago
  He said both "New Year's Eve, 2000" and "starting on Jan 1st, 2000". I'm not sure why he contradicted himself, but the first one would be 24h early, and the second one a whole year.
  - crispyambulance 6y ago
    My apologies, I had a brain fart.
rcoveson 6y ago
No. We define the centuries as the periods of 100 years beginning with the multiples of 100 in the year numbering system of the contextual calendar. The definition given by your reference is neither authoritative nor popular. If you follow the definitions advocated by Wikipedia and its collection of sources, you end up in an absurd state where the decades[0] span multiple centuries. It's absurd and does not reflect popular usage. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s
- sheepdestroyer 6y ago
  Why are you counting from 0? What do you mean by not authoriative in this context? This is just how the Gregorian calendar works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini#No_year_zero:_start_and_end_of_a_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini#No_year_zero:_star...
  - rcoveson 6y ago
    Why are you counting from AD 1, which nobody alive at the time called AD 1? It's natural to align the decades, centuries, an millennia with a decimal radix. You've got the year digit, the decade digit, the century digit, and the millennium digit. Decades are always talked about this way, e.g. "the 80's", and I'd wager that most people think about centuries and millenniums this way. The fact that the year number is defined as the ordinal year since the approximate birth of Christ, beginning with AD 1, doesn't strike me as particularly relevant. In other words, I'm not "counting from" anything. I'm describing the decimal year number in a manner that's natural for the radix.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - solstice 6y ago
      It doesn't matter whether people of the time said AD 1 or not, because the BC/AD b system was adopted much later. It's confusing and ultimately pointless, but if you plant apple trees, the year in which you do that is the first year in which you planted apple trees, not the zeroth year. After ten years elapsed, it is now the tenth year of your apple tree planting phase. I agree about your 80s example (of course I use it in the same way), but that doesn't change the fact that it ultimately doesn't make sense because you'll be off by one when counting backwards. So for colloquial conversations it's fine, for serious date calculations, you cannot just have one "decade" with only 9 years.
      - rcoveson 6y ago
        I understand the explanation, but your final statement is still wrong. If you're doing "serious date calculations" for any modern organization, and you are asked to make a graph of 20th century data by decade, you will be expected to use the standard decade divisions, i.e. 190_, 191_, 192_. If you include data from December 2000, and get different results from your colleagues, you have failed. The last decade of the 20th century was Jan. 1990 - Dec 1999, according to everybody except the most pedantic of history majors. And the idea that you could actually do serious date calculations that count backwards all the way to AD 1 while maintaining a precision of 1 year is also ridiculous. There are error bars around the year numbers from that long ago of something like 2-5 years. I understand the basis for the [1901-2000] definition. However, I really don't think its defense outweighs its huge downsides, especially the split-decade problem.

Sorry but no. "It began on January 1, 2001, and ends on December 31, 2100" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_century

gumby 6y ago

Isn't that what crispyambulance said (or perhaps a few hours before)?

sheepdestroyer 6y ago
He said both "New Year's Eve, 2000" and "starting on Jan 1st, 2000". I'm not sure why he contradicted himself, but the first one would be 24h early, and the second one a whole year.
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  My apologies, I had a brain fart.

rcoveson 6y ago

No. We define the centuries as the periods of 100 years beginning with the multiples of 100 in the year numbering system of the contextual calendar. The definition given by your reference is neither authoritative nor popular. If you follow the definitions advocated by Wikipedia and its collection of sources, you end up in an absurd state where the decades[0] span multiple centuries. It's absurd and does not reflect popular usage. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s

sheepdestroyer 6y ago
Why are you counting from 0? What do you mean by not authoriative in this context? This is just how the Gregorian calendar works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini#No_year_zero:_start_and_end_of_a_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini#No_year_zero:_star...
- rcoveson 6y ago
  Why are you counting from AD 1, which nobody alive at the time called AD 1? It's natural to align the decades, centuries, an millennia with a decimal radix. You've got the year digit, the decade digit, the century digit, and the millennium digit. Decades are always talked about this way, e.g. "the 80's", and I'd wager that most people think about centuries and millenniums this way. The fact that the year number is defined as the ordinal year since the approximate birth of Christ, beginning with AD 1, doesn't strike me as particularly relevant. In other words, I'm not "counting from" anything. I'm describing the decimal year number in a manner that's natural for the radix.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - solstice 6y ago
    It doesn't matter whether people of the time said AD 1 or not, because the BC/AD b system was adopted much later. It's confusing and ultimately pointless, but if you plant apple trees, the year in which you do that is the first year in which you planted apple trees, not the zeroth year. After ten years elapsed, it is now the tenth year of your apple tree planting phase. I agree about your 80s example (of course I use it in the same way), but that doesn't change the fact that it ultimately doesn't make sense because you'll be off by one when counting backwards. So for colloquial conversations it's fine, for serious date calculations, you cannot just have one "decade" with only 9 years.
    - rcoveson 6y ago
      I understand the explanation, but your final statement is still wrong. If you're doing "serious date calculations" for any modern organization, and you are asked to make a graph of 20th century data by decade, you will be expected to use the standard decade divisions, i.e. 190_, 191_, 192_. If you include data from December 2000, and get different results from your colleagues, you have failed. The last decade of the 20th century was Jan. 1990 - Dec 1999, according to everybody except the most pedantic of history majors. And the idea that you could actually do serious date calculations that count backwards all the way to AD 1 while maintaining a precision of 1 year is also ridiculous. There are error bars around the year numbers from that long ago of something like 2-5 years. I understand the basis for the [1901-2000] definition. However, I really don't think its defense outweighs its huge downsides, especially the split-decade problem.