Re: Replacing Passenger Stock (WAS Re: Bluebird Railcars for Gippsland)

[steam4me@enternet.com.au (Yuri J Sos)]

markbau1@aol.comnospam (MarkBau1) wrote, and I selectively quote:

>Can this be true??
>
>I find myself both agreeing with and defending David Bromage???

Mark, I'm sorry to have forced you to blot your copybook <g!>

>You don't need to be a mathematician to know that when you start 
>counting things,loco's, beers, years, whatever, you start at one as in.....1

It must be different "up over" in the States, but celebrations* for
the end of the decade and the end of the millennium down here in
Australia are all planned around the 31.12.1999/1.1.2000 changeover
(or should that be 12/31/1999-1/1/2000?  how USAified are you?), not
the 2000/2001 changeover.  I understand the mathematics involved, but
the media and the population in general seem to not want to wait
another year for the celebrations to begin.  Added to that, the
"millennium bug" or Y2K bug that everyone seems to be talking about
will cause problems (?) on 1/1/20000, not 1/1/2001.   Maybe in
2.1.2000, everyone will get all geed up about a "real" end of
millennium celebration on the proper date, I don't know.

The reference I made to John Howard was that about 9 months ago he
deigned to suggest that millennium celebrations would be more
appropriate on 1/1/2001: he was howled down and pooh poohed by the
media as being a spoilsport and wowser and generally wanting to get in
the way of a good time.

So I was merely following the popular convention that the decade ends
in 14 months' time.  

This argument is a bit like the number billion, which is a million
million everywhere except in the US where it's a thousand million.
However most of the general population (and the media) have now
adopted the convention that one thousand million is one billion: you
can nit pick, but the change has the weight of numbers.  The dynamics
of language, I suppose.

(* celebrations include parties and balls to be held by every major
hotel and casino in the land, "events" such as being over the South
Pole at exactly midnight, going to Tonga or American Samoa to be the
first to see the first rays of sunlight of the new decade/millennium).
Regards

Yuri
-- 
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Yuri J Sos
Melbourne VIC AUS

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