As I was reading the article I was thinking that the whole discussion was rather pointless..you can group the decades, centuries, and millenia any old way you feel like-- then the author said:

an I was greatly relieved.

The first day of the year, the number we attach to the year, and other details marking the passage of time are all an arbitrary convention. As long as everyone works within the convention we are okay.

The way he's phrased it, every year, and in fact, every day ends "a" decade. June 30, 2012 ends a decade that began on July 1, 2002. He describes that as a decade in the trivial sense.

It's true that nobody would describe 1990 as being one of "the 80's". But "the 80's" are not one of the decades of the 20th century. They're a decade in the "trivial sense", as he would put it.

Look at the way he's phrased this: "I meant, and still mean, specifically the first decade of the 2000s." Not the first decade of the 21st century, mind you, the first of the 2000's. Who talks about it that way? I've heard people talk about "the 80's", but I never heard anyone describe them as "the 9th decade of the 1900's". (And even if they did, they'd probably get it wrong and call it the 8th decade).

This part was amusing:


He has to say "or whatever", because he has no idea!! You never hear people refer to this decade as anything other than the first decade of the 21st century. So it seems a little convoluted to say that a decade that nobody ever refers to just ended.


Speaking of birthdays, there's a similar snafu there. When somebody turns 20, they often say "this is my 20th birthday". It's really the 21st, of course. They're forgetting to count the actual day of their birth (which is certainly more their birthday, than any of the others are).

When people say 20th birthday, what they really mean is 20th birth anniversary. Because as you pointed out, everyone of us have only one birthday! So 20th is ok I guess.

Yeah, that's what they mean, but nobody says it that way. It would be clunky to say "today is the 20th anniversary of my birth", so they say "today is my 20th birthday" instead, even though that's wrong. Maybe we need another word for birthday, which excludes your birth day.

One cute word I remember seeing in a Dr. Dolittle book when I was a kid was "mooniversary". I think it was in Dr. Dolittle's Zoo. They didn't want to wait a whole year to celebrate an anniversary, so they celebrated after a month instead.

How about birthiversary? When you hit 20, you say "today is my 20th birthiversary"?

Ahem. Getting back to science, here's an interesting article on the longevity of the Mars rovers. If only everything paid for by Washington worked so well.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/longlivedmarsroversbeginyear7onredplanet

How about the Voyager spacecraft (I and II) launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets? They're still sending back information 32 years later. Sure beats NASA's Orbiting Oceanic Carbon Observatory which, rather than go into orbit around the earth, plopped into the ocean shortly after launch.

I saw where one of the Voyagers passed the heliopause. Any more news since then?

Edit: the page just loaded. Never mind.

Meet FLIP or Floating Instrument Platform.. An oceanic research "vessel" that upends itself. More info here.

Woah! Cool. Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that jazz...

Sounding to me like noise from ocean waves or from falls but it is simply noise . Check out this oscillating white noise!