The Nose: Ringing In The New Year Right & Our Growing Lack Of Empathy
Nosers share their New Year's stories and reflect on Michael Vick.
Twice in one week, professional football crossed over from the sports pages and became part of the greater national dialogue.
And both instances involved the Philadelphia Eagles in completely unrelated ways. The first instance happened with President Obama applauded the Eagles for giving a second chance to Michael Vick. Obama took a lot of flak from people who say dogfighting is kind of a dealbreaker. Other people wondered whether the timing was a little self-serving. Applauding a second chance for Vick a year ago, before he returned to superstar form, would have been more courageous. And then the governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, blasted the NFL for postponing a football game because of a blizzard. He said it was proof America was turning into a nation of wussies. On this show, we're never even sure if you can say that word.
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This E-mail from Paul Will Make You More Confused
You guys almost had me when your expert declared that a decade ends at the transition from 0-1 instead of 9-0 based on the notion that there was never a year '0'. For a few minutes there I was sold on the concept but doubts kept nagging at me until I realized that without a doubt, he was wrong. Sorry.
If we were discussing systems of math, whole numbers, etc. then I would say that yes in this context the decile ends at 0-1. But that wasn't really the conversation, the specific question related to the calendar and how we track the passage of time.
Time is not tracked by a linear mathematical system... we have a system that attempts to represent the rotation of the earth into days, the revolution of the moon in months, as well as the revolution of the earth in years. It's non-linear and does not exactly synchronize with both our daily rotation and our annual revolution so we end up with leap years and even beyond that the occasional time remainder that must be corrected.
Also, be prepared to admit that we know in our hearts that the big event is the transition from 2009-2010, and even bigger is 1999-2000. We get excited about it for reasons that probably can't be explained. But more than that, there is established precedent. With our system of measuring time, we already use 9-0 as our dividing line when we talk about hours in the day. 11:59pm is followed by 12:00am, and vice versa. In our hearts as well as in our heads, we're already used to thinking of time in this way.
More importantly, whatever happened in the past changed in the 1970's when we started getting digital watches and clocks. I remember the first time we saw a mechanical digital clock, where the numbers flipped on a kind of invisible hub when the digits changed. All of the kids in the house gathered together and knowing nothing about the history of our number system, we knew it was really, really cool when the clock changed from 59 to 00 and we also quickly learned that the transition from 00 to 01 was no more interesting (important) than the transition from 02 to 03. Whatever the rules may have been before this event, it changed. We like to watch the digits flip and instictively we see that the more digits that flip, the more significant the moment.
Given that the way we measure time is contrived and uneven, this sets it apart from the logical and perfect graduation of numbers that are in our numbering system. Given that they are two different things, we can discard the notion that in a base-10 number system the decile transition is between 0 and 1. It doesn't matter because we use a different system for tracking time. And our digital watches and drunken new year's eve kisses are much more important to us in telling us when a new decade begins.
E-mail from Karl
Was I the only one whose brain was whipsawed by the conversation running from Tucker Carlson seriously beating his chest about the need of society to execute someone, to the idea of WNPR panelists not being qualified enough to say who was and who wasn't "wussy"? Compared to Tucker Carlson?
E-mail from Jonathan
Decades end on the 9 years 'cause of what we call 'em—the '80s, the '90s, etc. The eighties ended in 1989. They didn't end in 1990; that doesn't make sense.
It's actually the same with centuries. The last year of the 1800s was 1899. The confusing thing is that the last year of THE NINETEENTH CENTURY was 1900.
So, the decade ended last year. The aughts or the naughts or whatever we're gonna end up calling them were the ten years that started with a zero. 2009 being the last of them.
The other wrinkle is that we're currently in the teens decade. Even though we're still two years from a year with a teen number in it.
E-mail from Jim
As a teenager, New Year's Eve was always a time of great anxst and self-loathing for me. Not being very popular with the girls, and not ensconced in any of the "hip" cliques, I often found myself alone or with only one or two friends while the rest of the world was, if you could believe the mass media of the time (which I did), were off having terrific adventures in fabulous, far-off places like Times Square.
Today, I prefer the smaller celebrations for almost all holidays.
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