Lance Birch wrote:
> 
> Ok ok, but I'm sick of everyone else saying that the year 2000 is the
> starting point for the second millennium AD.
...

A.D.: an abbreviation for anno Domine, Latin for 'in the year of our Lord'. In
theory, this calendar counts the years since the birth of Christ, but most
scholars believe that Christ was born in 4 B.C.
So, the third millennium, if the Christian calendar were to be appropriately
adjusted, has been with us for a few years already. (Of course, it won't be adjusted.)

The Christian calendar has been adapted for the rest of the world by replacing
A.D. with C.E., or common era, presumably by those who wondered if they were
offending non-believers by adding 'A.D.' every time they wrote down the date.
I'm not sure when the abbreviation C.E. was first used, but it must have been
after A.D., which well after Christ [is said to have] died, anyway. If there
was no 0 A.D., there was probably no 1 A.D., 2 A.D., etc... And as Dan
Connelly pointed out, the whole calendar is arbitrary anyway; we are
celebrating a coincidence of numbers, which sounds like math to me, and
definitely worthy of a party.

As for me, I think the big party will be in just under a year, regardless of
any sort of public awareness campaign, because we just like to watch all of
those digits change. (Who cares when their car's milage changes from 10,000 to
10,001?)

(A[nother] completely irrelevant side note: others have tried to calculate the
date of the creation of the world according to religious texts, but these
differ by as much as a quarter of a millenium...)

-Mark R.

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