OFF: Re: what new century?!

[Eric Siegerman]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2000 at 12:48:49PM -0500, K Henderson wrote:
> Theo suggested...
> >The academic world no longer uses BC or AD to denote periods in
> >time, using, instead, CE [common era] and BCE, avoiding any silly
> >ethnocentricity...
>
> Never heard of this...sounds silly.  :)

It's not universal by any means.  Some people use BC/AD, some use
BCE/CE.  Biblical Archaeology Review, which I sometimes pick up,
is carefully agnostic; they print each article using the scheme
its author prefers.  But the flamewar erupts periodically in
their letters pages...

(BAR is definitely an archaeology magazine, by the way, not a
religion magazine.  Their sister publication, Bible Review, is
about religion -- which is why I almost never read it.)

> Anyway, in 'my' academic world, we denote time in BP, years before present.
> Of course, with the 'present' held constant at A.D. 1950.  Which I think is
> the year that radiocarbon dating was first established by the folks at U.
> Chicago.  Libby et al.  So this year would then be A.L. 50, I guess.

Well, only if AL dating has a Year Zero :-)

> Of
> course, this doesn't get away from the problem that a radiocarbon year and a
> 'real' calendar year aren't the same.  Like 10,000 BP 14C is really 11,700
> BP 14Ccal (calibrated to calendar years).

Now this is just plain f***ed.  What does an RC "year" correspond
to, then?

> And if you want to continue this bit of fun, here are all the choices you
> can have (within the first 'ten' only, as we lack any single characters for
> higher numbers)
> Base
> '2'     11111010000
> '3'     2202002
> '4'     133100
> '5'     31000
> '6'     13132
> '7'     5555
> '8'     3720
> '9'     2662
> '10'    2000

Maybe you geology types lack them :-)  We computer folks can go
at least a few higher:

'11'    1559
'12'    11A8
'13'    BAB
'14'    A2C
'15'    8D5

FWIW, which isn't much...

> So I guess to a computer, a 'millennium' really happens every 8 years...big
> deal.

:-)

ObPretendingToBeOnTopic:  In base 7237, one of my fave HW instrumentals would
be "Spiral Galaxy 4".

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics at telepres.com
|  |  /
Microsoft Lego would have square pips.