Nick--
Yes, I was joking about year zero, but decimal-year dates -0.1 and
-4.1 would be in 1 and 5 BCE, respectively, right? So I was right to
use -g y=floor(ev)- for the year calculation, I think. The trouble
arises with the days in the year, which would be a fraction (1-x) from
the start of the year, where x is the fractional part of the date
variable. Though given that the seventh month was named after a guy
who died in 44 BCE and the eighth month was named after a guy who died
in 14 AD, I don't know that you'd really want to use the date format
there. Why doesn't Stata have the Gregorian-Julian-Israeli-etc.
calendar conversion built in, anyway?
On 8/11/06, Nick Cox <[email protected]> wrote:
Theological and cosmological preoccupations aside,
there was no year zero, meaning either 0 AD or 0 BCE.
The concept of zero only reached the West much
later than the AD/BC system was introduced by Dionysus
Exiguus (= Denis the Skinny), as I recall, not to
imply that I was there at the time.
No doubt for some centuries after that various smart asses
found the idea of a symbol representing nothing incoherent
but seemingly every grade school student introduced to
the number line can transcend that.
Nick
[email protected]
Austin Nichols
> But now I have to go read Wikipedia about
> what happened in year zero, I think.
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