What do you think about when you see the number 2000?

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Do you think of a year, or just a number, or what?

First of all, it is a Cardinal Number, or Natural Number or as I used to explain it to my young pupils in my teaching days, it is a counting number like 0,1, 2, 3 etc. There is a slight difference between between Cardinal Numbers, and *Natural Numbers, but it is not my intention to have a deep discussion about mathematics here. Generally, *Natural Numbers do not include the 0, but there is more to it than that.

When you talk about the 2,000th item in a list, it is now an Ordinal Number, like 1st, 2nd 3rd etc. It denotes order.

The number 2,000 is written in Roman Numerals as MM! Who is old enough to remember having to do math calculations using Roman Numerals? Was that just a Scottish schooling requirement? Who can fill me in on that? I'm talking about the late fifties and early sixties! Perhaps it was because those bound for college had to study Latin too, and it was all connected! It was a requirement within the old O-Level Maths.

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Image ©Diane Macdonald. All Rights Reserved.
^{Camera used for background image, and also for image used as the pattern in the number: EOS 5D Mark II
Click on the image to view full screen!}

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The Greek symbol for 2,000 was β, but thankfully we did not have to do mathematical calculations using Greek symbols!

And who can ever forget (if you are old enough to have been around then), the panic surrounding the so-called Y2K Problem? People around the world waited with baited breath for everything that relied on technology to come to a grinding halt causing planes to crash and even microwave ovens to cease to work! We even had an academic friend who lectured about the doom and gloom. All the panic was based on the theory that COBOL programmers had left only two digits for coding in a year field, making programs worldwide think that the year was 1900 instead of 2000. As a former COBOL programmer, I had many debates with him pointing out that no COBOL programs I had ever written used only a 2 digit field, and that any old code in any companies that did have just 2 digit fields had long since been corrected! He would have none of it, but I am very happy to say that in this instance I was correct! There were a few minor problems with coding in some companies – but nothing that caused the worldwide disaster that academics were prophesying about! Y2K was a non-event!

What are your experiences with Y2K? Where were you at midnight? What were you thinking?

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But, why am I writing about 2,000 today? It's not about Y2K! DRUM ROLL PLEASE! It's because overnight I reached 2,000 followers. Granted that a few are dubious real Followers, but only spammers and bots! Still, that's an average of 200 Followers per month since I joined Steemit 10 months ago!

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Here are my statistics as of today:

FOLLOWERS: 2,005

POSTS: 10,377

REPUTATION: 58

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Thanks to @ginabot for reporting, I'm happy to announce that my 2,000th follower is @otrip and I will be sending 1SBD as a thank you! Thanks to all of you for your kind support of my ramblings!

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Thanks for taking the time to read this! I appreciate it. Please check out my photography-101 account here for tips and tutorials about photography.

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If you wish to take part in the #wiwcontest for this week, please read the rules and find the week's theme in this post.

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