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 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.