khurtwilliams
khurtwilliams
Dear internet people who flunked basic math. Counting starts at 1. The first decade of the Gregorian calendar started with year 1. The second decade started with year 11. The 203rd decade of the Gregorian calendar starts in year 2021. When asked about the dispute, Rick Fienberg of th... islandinthenet.com
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DrOct
DrOct

@khurtwilliams I had a longer reply but just removed it because it was unecessarily long and might not have come across the way I wanted (which is friendly!). The bottom line for me is that I personally think calendars are all arbitrary anyway, and can be, and have been changed numerous times. If we as a people want to declare a decade like "the twenties" to be all the years that have a 2 in the tens place then that's fine. If that means someone wants to go back and declare that the first decade of the calendar is only 9 years long... well that's ok too. It's all arbitrary and made up by us anyway, so why not? Anyway, just my two cents. Happy New Year!

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In reply to
jack
jack

@khurtwilliams Correct or not, I'm afraid the argument has been lost. Maybe I'm wrong and the "New Decade" party next December will turn out to be a Rager, but I'm not counting on it.

Also, I think my programmer friends would say that to assume counting starts at 1 is to guarantee you've just introduced a bug. :)

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artkavanagh
artkavanagh

@jack @DrOct @khurtwilliams

Also, I think my programmer friends would say that to assume counting starts at 1 is to guarantee you've just introduced a bug. :)

When it comes to reckoning years, counting does start at 1. Otherwise, children would celebrate their first birthdays after two years of life (and their 0th after 1 year). As @khurtwilliams points out above, the Gregorian calendar doesn’t include a Year Zero, and it would be quite odd if it did. Programming languages typically start with 0 because the decimal system would have to treat “10” as a single digit but for most purposes most of us start counting at 1, not at 0. It doesn’t make a lot of practical difference if people choose to celebrate a new decade, century or millennium a year early but ideally they should know they’re doing so.

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jack
jack

@artkavanagh @DrOct @khurtwilliams I knew I should've stayed out of it :).

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islandinthenet.com
islandinthenet.com

@DrOct But I think that's a different thing. A decade is any 10 years. I could say my wife and I have been married over two decades and it wouldn't matter when I started counting. But calendar decades start the count at year 1. We are in the 10th year of the 202nd decade of the Gregorian calendar.

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islandinthenet.com
islandinthenet.com

@jack I plan on having a raging good time bringing in the next decade at the end of this year.

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jack
jack

@islandinthenet.com I hope so! 😄

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