I assert that any system would be arbitrary, because we can't we can't count years either from the beginning of the universe, from the beginning of the Earth, or the beginning of life, because none of those dates are known with adequate precision. Furthermore we can't use "years since the date this text was written" because that would make reading any such text an absolute chore.
If there isn't an alternative, then complaining that about that arbitrariness is a worthless contribution to this discussion. Do you think that less arbitrary alternatives exist? Forget suggesting an alternative... are there alternatives at all?
I was complaining that it is "yet another time scale," which is not something we need. That it's arbitrary is also true, but not the thrust of the criticism.
I realize it may not have been obvious that that was the thurst of my criticism, but "yet another X" is a common phrase in the hacker community.
Looking at the wikipedia article for "Yet another," the very first sentence is this:
> Among programmers, yet another (often abbreviated ya, Ya or YA in the initial part of an acronym) is an idiomatic qualifier in the name of a computer program, organisation, or event that is confessedly unoriginal.
The point is, there is already a widely used system for dating years. Coming up with a new one adds nothing (except confusion).
Coming up with a new one that also overloads pre-existing English words is even worse.
I agree that it mostly causes unneeded confusion to have another arbitrary standard. I think usually they are created or perpetuated to give a minor convenience to a minority of specialists using it every day, but then they become popular and are constant obstacle for non-specialists. Other examples are the mole, angstrom, electron-volt, decibel and light year.
It looks like the usefulness of BP to specialists is because the carbon dating is done in reference to a sample which was prepared at that time. I don't know why they don't convert to BC or BCE for an article that non-carbon-daters are going to read though.
I assert that any system would be arbitrary, because we can't we can't count years either from the beginning of the universe, from the beginning of the Earth, or the beginning of life, because none of those dates are known with adequate precision. Furthermore we can't use "years since the date this text was written" because that would make reading any such text an absolute chore.
If there isn't an alternative, then complaining that about that arbitrariness is a worthless contribution to this discussion. Do you think that less arbitrary alternatives exist? Forget suggesting an alternative... are there alternatives at all?