Just what we need, yet another time scale that is totally arbitrary. How utterly worthless.
Amplified by the fact that the word "present" refers to a shifting moment in time, so it's an abuse of English to use it this way.
Amplified by the fact that the word "present" refers to a shifting moment in time, so it's an abuse of English to use it this way.
> "present" is actually a standard date: January 1, 1950
which is an abuse of the English langauge, since "present" actually means "now." Scientists should not overload pre-existing English words to mean other things.
If someone actually needs to say "before nuclear testing," which is very rare, they should say "before nuclear testing."
Why not? Because it confuses the overly-pedantic?
Have you ever used "dynamic" while not talking about physical forces? BOOM: you are an abuser! Repent! Repent!
Dark ages Europeans should stop overloading Latin words like "lingua" to mean other things.
Modern humans should stop overloading words like "existing" to mean exactly the same thing...
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 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.
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.