Exactly correct.
The only way a year ending in 0 can be the beginning of a new decade, century, or millennium is if the very first year on that calendar is 0. Since the Gregorian calendar begins with the year 1, only years ending in 1 can mark the beginning of a new decade, century, or millennium.
Morons.
But if you are a C or C++ programmer, the first year was 0 A.D., and 2000 was the start of the decade.
this did not escape people in 1901 which was correctly celebrated instead of 1900..
but we enlightened folks in 2000 celebrated the millenium and now we are celebrating a new decade...go figure???
Weren’t you just griping about this? ;)
Buzzkill! They just can’t stand people partying like it’s 1999!
People like congruity and even numbers to mark milestones. I know the decade does not technically start until next year, but who cares?
I'm happy to see that I am not alone in thinking the same thing. It really has put my teeth on edge to hear the news commentators say over and over again during the past week, "2010 marks the beginning of a brand new decade!" What a bunch of boobs!
We know.
But people seem predispositioned to celebrate things with zeroes on the end of them.
I remember this same discussion occurring ten years ago (amidst all of those dire Y2K warnings.) ;-)
Funny how people have to keep talking about this as if the argument hasn’t been made 57 billion times already.
So I guess 1990 wasn’t part of the 90’s decade?
It certainly does. Maybe not an ordinal decade (passing from the first decade of the century to the second), but certainly a cardinal decade in the popular understanding: the 80s ran from 1980 to 1989, the 90s ran from 1990 to 1999, the noughties ran from 2000 to 2009, the teenies (?) will run from 2010 to 2019, etc.
If you’re just counting the math yes, but really that makes for inconvenient definitions, that makes the 1970 part of the 60s, and 2000 part of the 1900s and that’s just goofy. I say the first decade/ century/ millennium got short sheeted a year so that 2010 is the beginning of the 2010s.
It’s like the 21st Century didn’t start until 2001. I remember discussions leading up to 2000 on that.
>> Why is this hard for otherwise intelligent people to grasp?
Computer scientist Edsgar Dijkstra was quite intelligent. He argued vociferously for numbering things beginning at zero.
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html
Besides, we couldn’t wait until 2001 to have the “why two kay” crisis. “Why two thousand and one” crisis just wouldn’t have had the same marketing appeal. :-)
The purist are right on this one, but in the scheme of things, I fail to see why anyone would get worked up about this.
It may be simple math ... but it is also an irrelevant technicality by which people attempt to make themselves feel superior to everyone that is celebrating a new decade.
For the record, 2010 kicks off a new decade if you started counting with 2000. It doesn’t matter where you started at the beginning of the calendar ... it matters where you started for this 10-year period.
SnakeDoc
The beginning of the new decade is indeed 2011, but our number system is not based on 1-10, it’s based on 0-9.
1 A.D. is part of the First Century, which is 1 A.D. to 10 A.D. This being the 21st Century (2001 to 2100) this is the last year of the first decade. Decade is derived from the Latin decas meaning ten. Other words for spans of years also come from Latin: lustrum (5 years), century (100 years), millennium (1000 years).
Since the common calendar starts from the year 1, its first full decade contained the years from 1 to 10, the second decade from 11 to 20, and so on. The interval from the year 2001 to 2010 could then be called the 201st decade, or 21st Century, using ordinal numbers.
I agree with the author when it comes to determining Decades, Centuries, Days of the Month, etc.
HOWEVER, this statement is absolutely false: “Ours is a decimal system, based on the numbers 1 through 10”
Ours is a decimal system alright, based on the numbers 0 through 9. There is no such single number as ‘10’.
In binary, there is 0 through 1. You can’t say binary is based on 1 through 1. Nor can you say Octal is based on 1 through 9 (because in octal there is no such number as 9).
Maybe I do not understand, but 2010 is, indeed, the beginning of a new decade. Here’s why:
Our calendar purportedly begins with the birth of Christ in 0 A.D., right? So the first ten years are the years 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. That is ten years - one decade. So the second decade begins in the year 10. If you follow this logic up through the decades since Christ’s birth, 2010 is, indeed, the beginning of a new decade.
Not sure why that is so hard to understand for so many people.