Re: What are we going to do with our clocks at 2000 AD?

[nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <336C3F31.3F53@swbell.net>,  <rubywand@swbell.net> wrote:
>>    Bzzzzt! There was no year 0
[snip]
>     Happily, the coming millenial event is not the first. We can look 
>back to the year which people of that time recognized as 1001 A.D., the 
>1001st year of our Lord. Did the Pope, bishops, monks, alchemists, 
>nobles, merchants, thralls, and peasants flock joyously into the faire 
>grounds to celebrate the millenium when 1001 A.D. dawned? No! they did 
>not. Everyone had already welcomed the millenium with the start of the 
>1000th year of our Lord.

   If your math is this bad in public, I seriously hope you paid
someone else to do your tax returns.

   A milennium is 1000 years. (That's what it means in Latin.) Calling
"January 1st, 1AD" the start of a milennium, the end of that milennium
is that date _plus_ one thousand years, or January 1st, 1001. Verify
that with a pocket calculator if that's too hard for you to grasp.

   Also, you rather overestimate the sorry state of affairs that
Europe was in at 1000-1001AD. Almost all of the population lived in a
feudal ("futile," thanks to Calvin & Hobbes :) system, working in the
same occupation (mostly farming) from cradle to grave. Education was
reserved for only the very rich or thoise in monastaries, and while
some may have noticed the year, the average peasant on the dirt road
didn't know or care about the year. There were a bunch of wackos just
like yourself who thought that a lot of zeros in the year meant
something, and as we can tell, nothing really happened.

>     Thus, both the application of logic and the record of established 
>convention serve to bring enlightenment and, with it, peace. You can be 
>sure that the dawning of the first day of the 2000th year of our Lord 
>will, indeed, usher in a new millenium!

   Whatever controlled substances your're ingesting are interfering
with your logic and your math. 2001 is the start of the third
milennium from a rather arbitrary and _WRONG_ date.  Jesus was born
4-7 B.C., so if you do the math correctly, we're already 2 milennia
past that date. You've also been totally ignoring that little fact
that the calendar's off by a few years, because you're got a bunch of
petty fantasies about a bunch of zeroes in a base 10 counting system.
Apart from a whole lot of wackos like you becoming real disappointed
real fast in January 2000, there won't be that much different.

Nathan Mates

--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/      <*>
# What are the facts? Again and again and again-- what are the _facts_?
# Shun wishful thinking, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors
# think-- what are the facts, and to how many decimal places?  -R.A. Heinlein