Today is February 17th 2007 by the calendar used by many Western nations. Tomorrow is the beginning of the Chinese New Year of the Pig signifying fertility and abundance, a good year to be born for would-be Chinese entrepreneurs. But it isn’t the year 2007 for the Chinese. They are not a young country. For them it’s the year 4708.

I thought it might be a good idea to do a little work on this topic. I write a lot about how our lives are run by our unexamined assumptions, and many people here think that the whole world runs on the same calendar as Washington DC, the centre of the world.