Open Eye: Letter: `As everybody knows...'

First, let me say how much I have enjoyed the issues of Open Eye that I have received so far. Being in Sri Lanka it generally takes some time for them to reach me, so it takes something quite significant to get me to write.

Oh dear. You tell us that for the next quiz to be published in December that we will have to wait 13 months for the answers.

1999 is not the last year of the millennium, nor 2000 the first year of the next. As everybody knows a millennium is a period of 1000 years. There being no year zero, the first millennium ran from 1AD to 1000AD, and the second, which we are now in, began in the year 1001AD. This will end at 31 December 2000, and the next millennium will begin on 1 January 2001. The celebrations which will take place throughout the year 2000 are actually to mark the end of the current millennium.