Good morning Patrick, I realise this is a fraught topic, and one that could get out of hand, but ...
As a geomorphologist working with archaeologists here in Australia and in southern Argentina, I'm quite used to working with radiometric dates, typically C-14 and other isotopes, plus other methods such as optically stimulated luminescence (OSL). Us geomorphologists tend to use "Before Present" or BP, and that is conventionally defined as pre-1954 when atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons began dropping a bunch of nuclides all over the place. Most Australian archaeologists use BP (in various combinations of "corrected" and "uncorrected" carbon dates depending on the context), but traditionally, European archaeologists tended to use AD and BC. I can envisage a date of 1200 y BP quite easily, but I struggle with 750 AD which is the equivalent. This is of course due to familiarity with BP. What I'm curious about is where did this push for BCE / CE come from? Who woke up one morning and said, "no more AD / BC, it's gotta be CE / BCE"? And why did they think / say that? And how did they get anyone to believe them? Why has it gathered momentum? Who / what organisation is actually pushing this? Is it just US political correctness gone totally feral, and being shoved down the throats of other societies and nations? Or worse, being slavishly adopted by people who should know better? While I don't accept the arguments (couched in very religious terms) of the Archbishop of Sydney for retaining BC / AD, I fail to see that BCE / CE is any better. So, who is pushing BCE / CE, and why? And why chose "common era"? What's "common" about it? Did someone start with "a" in the dictionary and go through words until they found something that was totally bland and inoffensive? Or was it more structured than that? As an aside, I confess that for quite a while I thought that CE stood for "christian era"! I haven't found a decent answer despite asking a lot of people. A final thought on bizarre units, and to show that I'm not a complete Aussie xenophobe ... there are three units used here by politicians and the morons in the media: "Sydney Harbours" ,"olympic pools" and "football fields". A "Sydney Harbour" is the rather large volume of water in Sydney Harbour, but I have no idea how this is defined (how far up the estuary etc.), or even how big it is. I could look it up, but I refuse to do so! It is commonly used in comparative terms, e.g. during floods when the flow is described as equivalent to so many Sydney Harbours per day. Or the volume of water in some dam is described as so many Sydney Harbours. Talk about totally meaningless! An "olympic pool" is the volume of water in an olympic-size swimming pool, and again used to impress us citizens about something. The fact that an olympic pool contains 1 ML seems to escape these cretins, and ML is a unit of volume taught in schools, and is perfectly acceptable to most of the world's population (except in the US of course!). Those of us who despise this sort of dumbing-down refer to these units as "sydharbs" and "olypols". And then we have "football fields" to describe area. Ho hum. There are four football codes in Australia: soccer (the round ball stuff for wannabe actors who love faking injury), rugby union (long ball, very English), rugby league (originally the working class form of the long ball game), and of course our home-grown Australian Rules football. As it happens the field size can vary considerably! Soccer, rugby union and rugby league pitches are rectangular, but aussie rules is +/- oval. So which code is being used? Yet in a country obsessed with house prices and thus the area of house blocks (square metres), we get this stuff on the news regularly. Still, if everyone adopted a single set of units, we would lose these wonderful cultural differences. Cheers, John John Pickard [email protected] ----- Original Message ----- From: Patrick Powers To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, December 24, 2011 9:04 AM Subject: Re: Proceedings for Future of UTC meeting >....the Archbishop of Sydney has made an impassioned plea for retention of BC / AD, and to eschew the secular adoption of BCE / CE. I wonder who will win this particular ideological battle?< He’s absolutely right of course and I hope the status quo is retained. The terms CE/BCE may be understood in the US and possibly Canada too but the ‘so called secular’ approach simply raises confusion in the rest of the world. I was a referee for the Institute of Physics for over 30 years on a specific topic of mass spectrometry instrumentation. At that time that encompassed those instruments used for carbon dating and I well recall a 2000 year discrepancy that was disclosed in one paper that arose from confusion between stating dates as Before the Current Era and Before the Common Era. Let the world retain what is understood. There is no need for change.- especially change that requires the entire world to be taught it consequences. Patrick
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