Topic: Random Thoughts
Okay, maybe this isn’t the most important subject going right now, but it is a pet peeve of mine. The New Year is nigh and we are being bombarded with things like "End Of The Decade Sale", "Top Ten Athletes Of The Decade", even "Top Ten Bikini Moments Of The Decade", (you've gotta love that FOXNews). The only problem with that is that people who are saying things like that are showing that they have no aptitude for mathematical logic whatsoever. Now I guess technically you can take any successive ten years and call it a decade by definition, just as any successive hundred years is a century, any successive thousand years is a millennium, and so on and so forth. But people are using our system of numbering years as the criteria that the decade is changing, because the year is changing from 2009 to 2010. Apparently the changing of the last two numbers from single digit value to double digit value, (the 0 before the nine has no value in this context), means it is a new decade because we are now entering the teens. The same phenomenon occurred when the year changed from 1999 to 2000 in that people declared the beginning of a new millennium. Well allow me to explain why those who believe this are 100% wrong.
When counting things, anything, whether it be socks, dollar bills, losses by the Denver Broncos that they should have won, anything at all, what do you number the first item? Do you say this first sock is number 0? No, you assign the number 1 to the first item, correct? (Don’t argue just stick with me). So using this inherently sound logic you haven't accumulated ten items until you have included number ten. The next group of ten items starts with the number 11, (see table below for visual clarification).
| FIRST DECADE | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| SECOND DECADE | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
| THIRD DECADE | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
As you can see the first decade started with year one, and ended after year ten. The second decade started with year 11, etc... and so forth. The same concept applies to centuries and millennia, one century is not over until after year 100, the next century starts with year 101. And a millennium is over after year 1,000 while the new one starts at 1,001.
Ergo, this decade will end after the year 2010, and the new decade will not start until January 1st, 2011.
