millenium

My personal take on the matter is that the only problem here is that
we're trying to liken our BC and AD year-numbering systems to positive and
negative versions of one another.

It's more appropriate to view BC and AD numbering schemes as two
separate year-numbering systems. The monks who came up with our
year-numbering scheme had no concept of zero, much less of negative
numbers. The seeming confusion factor of there being no year zero becomes
irrelevant as soon as we stop trying to liken "BC" to a negative sign.

Given that, there's no conceptual reason why we can't think of there
being a year 0AD or 0BC (as long as we don't try to equate the two of
course). There's no reason whatsoever why a given year can't have two
different designations, each based upon a different numbering system.
After all, the Chinese would call those years "The Year of the Dragon" or
whatever.

So as far as I'm concerned, the first decade consisted of years 0AD-9AD
(inclusive), the first century 0AD-99AD, and the first millenium 0AD-999AD.
There is no fallacy in that at all. The only thing that's odd about it is
that the year 0AD is more commonly called 1BC, but that's just a
convention.

Now there IS a fallacy in assigning year numbers from one, and its the
same as that in counting musical intervals from 1. You can't count years
like you would count rocks, because years have a beginning and an end, and
rocks do not. You can however count boundaries between years as though
they were discrete objects. That result is equivalent to counting the
number of whole years completed since time zero. That however implies the
existence of a year zero.

Failure to recognize the distinction between the boundaries between
units of measurement and the spans of units of measurement is exactly why a
musical 3rd above a 4th works out to be a 6th rather than a 7th.
Imaginarily laying out all intervals in front of us and numbering them from
one, belies the fact that they are measurements of pitch DISTANCE. If we
had never considered a unison as the first of several rocks to count, but
instead as a pitch-difference of zero, then that interval addition problem
would have worked out correctly as a 2nd plus a 3rd equalling a 5th.

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>Anybody out there using this software?

I haven't use Justonic's software yet, but I too am definitely
interested in what anybody who has thinks of it.

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