21ST Century Home
21st Century
The new century began in culture on New Year's Day 2000 even though the actual mathematical and scientific change was on New Year's Day 2001. In contemporary history, the 21st century began with the United States as the sole superpower in the absence of the Soviet Union, with five other entities, China, India, the European Union, Brazil and the Russian Federation as potential superpowers in the coming decades. As the Cold War was over and terrorism said to be on the rise, the United States and its allies turned their attention to the Middle East.
Digital technology, in its early stages of mainstream use in the 1980s and 1990s, became widely accepted by most of the world, though concerns about stress and antisociality from the overuse of mobile phones, the Internet and related technologies remains controversial.
In 2008, 3.3 billion people globally, or nearly half the world's population used cell phones, and in 2005, over a billion people worldwide used the Internet
Calendar
A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial, or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months, and years. The name given to each day is known as a date. Periods in a calendar (such as years and months) are usually, though not necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the sun or the moon. Many civilizations and societies have devised a calendar, usually derived from other calendars on which they model their systems, suited to their particular needs.
Calendar Year
Generally speaking, a calendar year begins on the New Year's Day of the given calendar system and ends on the day before the following New Year's Day. By convention, a calendar year consists of a natural number of days. To reconcile the calendar year with an astronomical cycle (which could not possibly be reckoned in a whole number of days), certain years contain extra days. Through further insertion of non-day units of time, the calendar year can be further synchronized; however, these extra units of time are not considered part of the calendar.