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34 J. Value Inquiry 1 (2000)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi34 and id is 1 raw text is: kA The Journal of Value Inquiry 34: 1-6, 2000. 1 © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. EDITORIAL The Mistake of the Century and Moral Deliberation THOMAS MAGNELL Editor-in-Chief Not only the mistake of the century, it is also the mistake of the millennium. Indeed, it is also the mistake of the decade, though by contrast that seems of little moment. Most people believe that 2000 is noteworthy as the beginning of the twenty-first century and the start of the third millennium. Most people are wrong, unless century and millennium are being used in a Pickwickean sense, or we do not count years with natural numbers or do not wish to continue to use the calendar that we have been using. The facts of the matter are plain enough. Century marks one-hundred, millennium one-thousand years. We count units of time, whether minutes, hours, days, or years, as we do coins, units of distance, and fingers, starting with the number one. We use the Gregorian calendar, not the Julian, Aztec, or Sumerian calendar. As a result, ends of centuries and millennia, and decades too as far as that goes, have dates that end in zeros, new ones with ones. The general point is not hard to appreciate. It takes one-hundred cents to fill a piggy- bank with one dollar, not ninety-nine, and it takes one more, a hundred and first, to get a start on a second dollar. One-thousand millimeters make up a meter, not nine-hundred and ninety-nine, a second meter beginning with the millimeter beyond the thousand, the thousand and first. Arthur C. Clarke got it right when he wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey. Counting centuries and millennia themselves with natural numbers, twenty-hundred and one opens the twenty-first century and two-thousand and one opens the third millennium. An unfortunate aspect of the mistake of the century and millennium is that the year 2000 is special for a different reason which has been missed. 2000 will be a leap year as a result of horological corrections introduced with the Gregorian calendar. But it will not be an ordinary leap year, one year in every four which corrects for a tropical year that is actually somewhat longer than three hundred and sixty five days. The addition of a day to years evenly divisible by four in fact overcompensates for the actual time it takes for the earth to go around the sun. To correct for that, the Gregorian calendar has a rule that years which are evenly divisible by one hundred, though evenly

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