Beginning of a new decade and maybe time to look positively at our future. I was sad to read a blog where a yorkshire farmer’s wife said she didn’t expect to see the next decade. I sincerely hope I do, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after that.
I know that “may you live in interesting times” is supposed to be a Chinese curse (is it really?) but I am delighted to be living in interesting times. Sadly though, much of what the media spews out is so dire it’s difficult to believe that this moment in time is anything but ghastly. So… some positive thoughts (anyone else care to join in?)
I’d like to start with a snippet from the Economist that Other Half read to me:
“In each machine a fleck of molten tin is dropped in front of a laser beam powerful enough to cut metal 50m times a second. The atoms of tin are instantaneouly heated to 1m°C, which smashes their outer electrons from their nuclei. Interactions between the newly free electrons and the atomic nuclei pumps out what are called “extreme ultaviolet” light with wave lengths of just 13.5nm.” And no, we’re not talking nuclear plants - this is a fabrication unit which is making high performance chips for mobile phones, smart cards, etc etc. In only fifty years we have got to here from a moment when the one electric calculator in our office was stolen and the thieves had to wheel it out of the office on the trolley that came with it, because it was so big and heavy. Imagine what the next fifty years holds for us.
I offer a thought - we are (probably) rapidly running out of oil. All the plastics we are making at the moment from oil based chemicals are supremely wasteful, not ideal for the environment and indeed not even that great as a material (think of all the plastic stuff that so quickly breaks / goes brittle / discolours in UV light. So, something will start to replace these plastics - and pretty quickly. We’re already seeing wood / bamboo substitutes and the like. Cellulose was there well before the first plastics. And has the huge advantage that it is renewable and (if required) degradable. So, we are only a nanosecond away from the greening of the planet. I suggest starting with Australia (and not with high resin trees like eucalyptus, but Southern oaks maybe). The greening of the planet will help moderate climate change.
Another thought. We are only about 20 years away from totally tailor made healthcare based on nutrition (with the occasional need to mend broken bones). (All of this already exists.) Computer analysis of a drop of living blood, urine, breath, faeces will be all that is needed to give us information to tweak our diet / nutrition to keep us in optimal health. Genetics? Not a problem. We already have epigenetics - the ability to turn on or off gene expression based on what we take into our bodies.
My resolution for the coming decade? And for the ones to come - God willing - to be here to see and revel in what this amazing world and humanity at its very best is capable of doing. Anyone care to join me?
The good news Sue is the new decade doesn’t start until 01/01/2021, so we’ve plenty of time to prepare for it. We’re now in the last year of the current decade.
Whilst I’ve never believed that the sustainability of our planet should be subject to any economic model that basically strip mines her natural resources (including water in Australia) to profit a handful of corporations…I will none the less join you in a wish to personally see a fair few decades yet in the hope that when I do eventually leave my physical body that I also leave a more sustainable future for my grandkids and their kids and all the worlds children…
I’m not a fan of anything “smart”…not smart meters nor smart cities nor smart phones (although I have a creaky old one) and am presently distrustful of faceless and unaccountable AI…
For greening the Earth and for numerous other reasons then I don’t think we could beat growing hemp absolutely everywhere…
You might be surprised to learn that not only does(did) the decade start on 1.1.2020 but there is even an ISO standard which covers the matter.
https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:std:iso:8601:-1:ed-1:v1:en
3.1.2.22
decade
time scale unit (3.1.1.7) of 10 calendar years (3.1.2.21), beginning with a year whose year number is divisible without remainder by ten
Thanks for the article Helen, fascinating. I think there is a place in this world for “smart” - it’s what helps farmers reduce the need for watering and to use less fertiliser, to move money through parts of the world where there is no good banking structure, to educate and train those in remote places - it’s not all bad.
Thanks for clearing up that one Paul.
[quote=“ptf, post:4, topic:28462”]
You might be surprised to learn that not only does(did) the decade start on 1.1.2020 but there is even an ISO standard which covers the matter.
It may be official but it is still wrong. How do people count ten years? By starting with a theoretical year 0 or by starting with 1?
Is there any “good banking structure” though…???
How come Australia’s water is increasingly “owned” (as if rain…water…can be owned by anyone let alone a corporation) by outside interests…???
How come water can be leased back to farmers who can’t afford to buy it so their livestock die…???
How is it that Australian water…a natural resource surely… is in the hands of Chinese dams and bottling plants…the natural aquifers and springs diverted to feed the aforementioned and also fracking wells…???
The thing is that decades are really cultural, not mathematical, entities - we talk of “the twenties” - which, logically, means the decade starts in 2020 and runs to 2029.
We don’t talk of “the 3rd decade of the 21st century”, or “the 203rd decade of the Christian era” - if we did, of course then it would be reasonable to argue that it does not start until 2021 (we count centuries from year 1 - there is no “year 0” in the Gregorian calendar).
So, while the 21st Century did, indeed, start on 1.1.2001 - “the twenties” started on 1.1.2020.
(and, in general, people who write ISO standards are not completely daft)
Just because there is an ISO standard Paul doesn’t mean it is universally considered to be right. It just means it is the ISO standard… ISO can define any standards they like and we can choose to comply with them or not, or choose some other standard. I’ve always started counting at one myself (apart from programming in machine code back in the day) and for me and others this is the tenth year of the last decade. Feel free to refer to this as the JCS standard 
I reckon that they are a little bit daft though.
If you apply their own definition, then years 1 to 9 are not contained within any decade at all as 1 cannot be divided by 10, if as they seem to wish, the answer resulting from the calculation needs to be a whole number.
Alternatively, it could be argued that any period of ten years could be considered a decade, as for example, 2019 is divisible by 10 without remainder, the answer of course being 201.9
So then, the only consistent result of these various possible outcomes of applying the definition is that the definition itself is inherently faulty.
Hence it would seem that the authors of said definition must be a little bit daft at least.
I wonder sometimes why my mind bothers to consider such things, but then perhaps I’m a little bit daft as well. Or is it just that I watch too much QI perhaps.
There was quite a lot on the media last week suggesting that is was the end of the decade.
For me from 01/01/2010 to 31/12/2019 seems to make sense to be a decade with a new decade starting on 01/01/2020.
The computer security entrepreneur and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth commented on the Standardization of Office Open XML process by saying: “I think it de-values the confidence people have in the standards setting process”, and alleged that ISO did not carry out its responsibility. He also noted that Microsoft had intensely lobbied many countries that traditionally had not participated in ISO and stacked technical committees with Microsoft employees, solution providers and resellers sympathetic to Office Open XML:[36]
When you have a process built on trust and when that trust is abused, ISO should halt the process… ISO is an engineering old boys club and these things are boring so you have to have a lot of passion … then suddenly you have an investment of a lot of money and lobbying and you get artificial results. The process is not set up to deal with intensive corporate lobbying and so you end up with something being a standard that is not clear.
But as a kiddie Mat did you go… zero, one, two, three… eight, nine… ready or not etc. or 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,10 
The whole future of cache cache could be in jeopardy.
Except that in this case it is right.
As I said - we talk of “the twenties” - how does defining “the tewnties” as being from 2021 to 2030 work, exactly? If you ask “the man on the Clapham omnibus” which decade 2030 is in I suspect that the answer will be “the thirties”.
1-9 are certainly within the block of 10 years starting with a year exactly divisible by 10 though - look at the definition again.
As soon as we talk about division with “remainders” we are implicitly talking about integer divisions - so your example is 201, remainder 9
It’s not difficult - by normal convention it is “the twenties” or “les années vingt” - i.e all the years with a tens digit of 2, it’s not about where we start counting years in the century (which is from year 1) and the ISO standard codifies that widely understood convention unambiguously.
As soon as retired Paul I stopped giving a toss about ISO standards (or omnibus passengers) a strategy that has served me (and Clapham) well for nearly ten years now 
The JCS standard evolves much more quickly and is eminently more flexible due to the size of its decision making body…me. The new decade will start chez nous in a year, based on how that goes we’ll decide when next one will start.
For me it is far simpler - The Twenties are any year that has the word Twenty in it.
For the counting issue - ask someone to count from twenty to thirty and the will start at 20.
A valid interpretation.
I just tried counting aloud up to thirty. The natural way for me was to count up to twenty without drawing a second breath: "…seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty …(draw a deep breath, then continue) twenty-one, twenty-two etc etc up to twenty-nine, and running out at thirty . (Draw breath again and proceed to next quorum) beginning with thirty-one.
Seems very natural grouping to me, decade begins with umpty-one, and ends with tumpty.
You could try it.
Meet Mr Peter Goble…head of the “Your problems solved immediately department”
Nice one Peter 
As has been pointed out you can mark any 10-year span as “a decade” - but how the 10-year span conventionally called “the twenties” can include xx30 is beyond me 