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Permalink Reply by Simon Heffer on November 22, 2012 at 7:06am

Silly? Maybe a little. After all over 70% of the world doesn't believe in Jesus Christ and no-one's made any great effort to change the way we depict the year. People don't like change, its a convenient 4 digit number. Think of all the fuss the Millennium 'bug' caused - change year 0 to a date 10000 or 10000 years ago would be a nightmare not to mention who gets to choose!

There are many other measurements that made sense at the time but could have better solutions but will not change because its too difficult - 60 minutes in an hour/24 hours a day,yards/miles,lbs/oz etc.

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Permalink Reply by Matt Giwer on Thursday

Pick a number, any number, call that the year number, what does it matter?

Look at what it replaced. The Xth year of the reign of Y. That isn't so bad if it is you and your country and your king but try to keep track of dates, what happened when in a kingdom far,, far away keeping track of years in the same way? There probably be someone with the full time job of keeping track of how one event related to another.

But even with the simplicity it took something like four centuries to catch on. There was no year 1000 panic because no one used the numbering system a century and a half or whatever later.

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Permalink Reply by Professor Robert on Thursday

You're being silly.  It's just a human convention.   Why not complain about the names of the months?

However, there is an alternative which is often used in academic circles.  It's B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) to replace B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini).

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Permalink Reply by matt.clerke on Thursday

Satanists define the current era to begin at the formation of their church. They are now in about year 50 or so I think. Probably doesn't really help you.... just interesting.

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Permalink Reply by Doug Reardon on Friday

Various cultures have various dating methods.  It's all arbitrary and capricious  It all boils down to common usage.

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Permalink Reply by Unseen yesterday

As someone else pointed out, it's a convention, and most if not all conventions are absurd, if not meaningless. This is because they result from a stipulation. We can't have an exact year based on anything meaningful, like the year the Earth formed (it formed slowly over a long long time) or the day the year the first true human strode the Earth (how could one possibly decide what the first true human was, much less settle on a year). So, we accept stipuations.

Even when there is a reason for a stipulation, such as the way the centigrade scale was decided, it is still a stipulation.

There are many such questions: why is a second as log as it is? who decided there should be 60 seconds in a minute, and why? Ditto for hours? Obviously, days and years have an objective basis, but why is a week 7 days and not 5 or 10, which would seem to satisfy our preference for decimal math?

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