Just 8 weeks left of this decade!

[Sam Slater]

You cannot know for sure when the year 1AD actually was. Even Dionysius got it wrong. Like I told Steve, astronomers actually use 1BC as the year 0 because -1 does not come directly before 1 in mathematics. There has to be a zero. Since the correct Gregorian calendar should have a zero the real Millennium would indeed be Jan 1st 2000AD because the first day after Christ's birth would be 1st Jan 0AD (ignoring the questions surrounding Christ's real birth year and even the month).

Jan 1st 2000 - Dec 31st 2009 is exactly 10 years. Count the days if you don't believe me.

[Sam Slater]

But everybody else actually celebrated the Millennium in the year 2000 which proves a point against your original point.....ha ha ha.....

[Sam Slater]

The tenth year of a decade is the last year, obviously.

[Sam Slater]

[quote]Sigh. Most people celebrated the end of the 20th century at end of the 31/12/99. Is this what you mean?[/quote]

Yes. You're catching on.

[quote]If 1999 was the last year of the 90s and there are ten years in a decade, would it not be logical that when you add one more number to 9 you get 10, making it a decade of numbers ie ending in 2000.[/quote]

Not if you count the first year of the 90s as 1990.

[quote]There is no year zero and numbers always start at ONE not zero.[/quote]

The problem with the Gregorian calendar, and the mistake Dionysius made was that it also has negative years (25BC for example). Once a scale goes into the negative is HAS to have a zero, just like degrees on a temperature scale, or any graph you can think of. You talk of 'logic' and there it is. You cannot logically jump from a unit of 1 to a negative.

[quote]Your point about the way astronomers count time is misleading, their sidereal day is 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds, their new decade could not start exactly on the stroke of midnight 31st December 2009 as they don't use civil clocks the way everybody else does. [/quote]

Misleading? Not at all. I wasn't even getting into what they use as a day, only how they've modified the calendar to correct it. Regardless of the 'time' of the millennium by astronomers clocks it's not this that makes the year 2000 the correct year of the millennium but the correction of inserting a year 0AD in place of 1BC.

Not that any of this takes away my main point, in that it's 10 years this year since the millennium celebrations.