re: #294 Sharmuta
My father and I once had a huge argument over when the new millennium started. He said 2000, and I said it was 2001 because there was no year zero. My father insisted, so I said you don’t start counting with zero. We consulted the World Almanac and Book of Facts. It sided with me, but that still wasn’t enough. The dispute was finally ended when Jerry Seinfeld agreed with me on nation television.
Thanks for the accuracy check.
The absence of a zero year in or calendar system is a gigantic, annoying pain in the ass for those of us who have had to write calendrical software spanning what ought to be a mathematically smooth transition, but instead becomes a discontinuity.
Personally, I like to keep years that start with a particular decadic number together. This involves beginning the count with zero, but that’s considered completely sensible, especially in computer circles. The downside is that the “first” decades AD and BC each only have nine years in them, but my attitude toward that is “tough.” ‘Cause in real life, it just doesn’t matter, but when I refer to “the Twenties,” in mean everything including the year 1920 (or 2020, when that occurs), not 1921 through 1930.
I’ll defer discussion of the anomaly introduced by the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in October 1582 (which can be seen here if you select that month) with it’s discarding of the fifth through the fourteenth of the month for another time.