15/3/99

Of zeroes and MDCCCCLXXXXVIIII

    In the year 1000, Bohemia and Moravia united, Beowulf was written, Leif Ericson discovered America, the Chinese perfected gunpowder, Sridhara recognized the importance of the zero, and there was widespread fear of the end of the world and the Last Judgment.
    A millennium later, those developments are still with us.
    Sridhara's discovery came just in time, because so many zeroes were needed in 1000 but weren't in 999.
    The widespread fear was justified, but for the wrong reason: the beginning of the end  can be traced to the emergence of gunpowder, but that's not what unhinged humanity at the time. It was, like today, all those fearsome zeroes. Sort of a Y1K hysteria.
    It's only March, but already the ticking of the clock, counting off to the final seconds of December 31, is giving us the willies. 
    I'm not even involved in an Internet millennium chat group, but I've been getting wooly e-mail messages about the subject from all over, which indicates that there is widespread obsession. And, like I said, it's only March.
    John Attamack, a computer systems analyst ("the Official Occupation of the Millennium") from Raleigh, North Carolina, ponders an oft-pondered point: "While it is true that, the way the calendar was constructed, there was no Year Zero, it seems that those who insist that the 'new century' or the 'new millennium' does not start in 2000, but rather in 2001, are forgetting an important point:
    "Our calendar not only did not have a 'year zero,' it also did not have years 1 through 545, except in retrospect. It was in the year 545, I think, that our calendar from the birth of Christ was incorrectly computed.
    "Prior to that year, those who even knew what year it was would have told you the number of the year 'from the founding of the city,' i.e., Rome.  The year 545 would have been 1298 by that reckoning."
    Paul Sidorsky, of Calgary, pooh-poohs the academic debate. "Whether it's celebrated as the beginning of the third millenium (sic), the end of the second one, or the beginning of the '2000s', it's still cause for a hell of a party."
    Londoner Graeme Thomas, who as a Scrabble expert gets riled about such things, takes umbrage with the common misspelling sicced above.

    "The word 'millennium' comes from the Latin mille, meaning a thousand, and annus, meaning a year. The word thus means a thousand years. The word 'millenium' doesn't exist, but if it did, it would come from mille and anus. The latter means the same in Latin as it does in English, and so the combination means a thousand assholes."
    Benjamin Richler, of Hebrew University, got this e-mail message from 2,000 years ago:
    Rome
    January 6, 1 B.C.

    Dear Cassius,

    Are you still working on the Y zero K problem? This change from BC to AD is giving us a lot of headaches and we haven't much time left. I don't know how people will cope with working the wrong way around. Having been working happily downwards forever, now we have to start thinking upwards. You would think that someone would have thought of it earlier and not left it to us to sort out at the last minute.

    I spoke to Caesar the other evening. He was livid that Julius hadn't done something about it when he was sorting out the calendar. We called in the consulting astrologers, but they said that continuing downwards using minus BC won't work. As for myself, I just can't see the sand in an hourglass flowing upwards.

    Vale.

    Plutonius.

BUT NEVER mind 2000. 1999 is problematic enough.

     Michael Stroh of the Baltimore Sun interviewed Marietta Nelson, a reference librarian at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, one of two official US timekeepers.
   "The Miss Manners of chronology recently received an e-mail asking  the following: How do you write the year 1999 in Roman numerals? Should it be the windy MDCCCCLXXXXVIIII? The economical MCMXCIX? Or the snappy MIM?
    "Latin may be dead, but the seven Roman numerals  I, V, X, L, C, D,  and M  live on in odd corners of the planet.
   "They lend dignity to clock faces and the cover of The New York  Times, and a quotient of cool to computer chips such as Intel's Pentium II processor. They enumerate popes and kings, Olympic Games  and Super Bowls. Hollywood has long inscribed film copyright dates in  Latin. Builders chisel Roman numerals into cornerstones and monuments.
   "Those who seek information on Roman numerals will find a frustrating lack of it. In fact, the closest thing to a scholarly work  on the subject over the past half-century was a 1996 children's book  about using Roman numerals to count pigs.
    "Roman-numeral experts, such as there are, disagree on the best way  to resolve the issue. In fact, scholars say the rules children learn today are actually 20th-century conventions, and not necessarily the rules Romans used.
    "For example, children today learn  to write the number 9 as IX, which translates as one subtracted from  10. It's a lot more compact than VIIII, which represents 5 plus 4.
    " 'In the earlier period (the Romans) would have spelled out  literally everything,' says Brian Rose, associate professor of  classical architecture at the University of Cincinnati. 'So Julius  Caesar, were he alive today, would date his 1999 checks  MDCCCCLXXXXVIIII.'
   "Even the Romans weren't good at Roman numerals. They frequently  broke the few rules they had.
   "So, how should you write 1999 in Roman numerals?   
    "In the end, Nelson relied on earlier precedents. Since  the number 49, for example, was almost always written as XLIX rather  than IL, the government arbiters settled on MCMXCIX for the year 1999.
   "Of course, there's no argument about what to do when the millennium rolls around. Just date your check MM. And hope there's a bank still open to cash it."