Nope. The minute and hour are, and usually the rest… but the year is based on the wobbly revolution of this rock around the Sun, so we have to make occasionally adjustments (leap days and leap seconds) to get them back in correlation. That means if I say something will happen 50 years from now, or I say something will happen (50 years)(365 days/year)(24 hours/day)(60 minutes/hour)(60 second/minute) = 1576.8 million seconds from now, I don’t mean the same thing. We muck around with that 365 days/year to get it to work out better (it’s closer to 365.25 days/year, but I’m not sure how many significant digits leap seconds take that out to).
I’m not saying we should abandon the system; we use dates to signify a certain position of this wobbly rock in relation to the Sun, so the calendar system should stay in place. But we have to realize that the calendar system and the time system are not exactly the same thing.
Now to the OP:
I prefer BCE and CE. Sure, it’s acknowledging the previously believed date of the birth of some guy who may or may not have even existed as the start of the “common era”… but if we pick a date and accept it, no matter how arbitrary that date may be, that date is the beginning of the common era (or, to put it another way, commonly accepted era). Even an atheist such as myself has to accept that our calendar system is pretty darn common… but we don’t have to accept that this is the 2004th year of our lord.
[SF interlude]
In The Last Trump (an Isaac Asimov story), God decrees that the world will end and judgement commence on a particular date (October 23, 1957 IIRC). The angel who’s been watching over our planet argues with the creator, saying that such a date has no meaning to the majority of the people residing on our world. God says that he’d always known that, and he was just waiting for the angel to realize the point.
The story closes with R. E. Mann (the human avatar of Satan in the story) drawing up plans for a new calendar beginning with the first artificial atomic chain reaction. He figures that gives him a little less than two millenia to get the entire population on a single calendar.
[/SF interlude]
I’m in it just for the change. I’ve got my eyes firmly set on the party of the big changeover from 9,999 to 10,000. Plus if we added two year zeros (one for our era and one for the one before) we’d nix all those “the real millennium doesn’t begin until 2001” people.
Really it’s just change for the sake of change. And for a very slighty increase in simplicity. I don’t feel any particular attachment to the years we currently use. Heck, truth be told I’d vote for metric time too, say 100,000 moments per day. And I’d redefine length so that the speed of light is exactly 100,000,000 length units per time unit. Thus slightly increasing the simplicity of physics. And I’d do it just so that I could bore my grandchildren with all these stories about the way we did it way back when.
I make calendars every year for friends. I always use “C.E.”, since they are contemporary calendars, not 2000-year old ones. One was sent to a Jewish friend, who thanked me for not using “A.D.” So there is more sensitivity out there than just scientists or atheists.
As far as converting to a totally different system starting on a different date, why fix it if it ain’t broke?
And for the argument that it’s difficult to calculate the number of days between dates, that might have been a good one until recently. Computers can calculate just as fast in metric, English or whatever number system. With a calculator in every pocket, are you really going to use fingers and toes for mathematics nowadays?
Only because that retarded system of decimal numbering caught on. If binary or some base 2 exponential like octal or hexadecimal had caught on, the English system would make perfect sense. And think how much easier it would be for people to work with computers then.
FM:When I said “hopeless and unuseable”, I was referring to outside of daily life.
The thing is, though, that daily life is what most people mostly use a calendric/timekeeping system for, and in daily life it does make quite a bit of sense to have time units synchronized with days and seasons and so on. (Hey, we already gave up the lunar month, quitcher bitchen. )
Another academic here who always writes “BCE/CE” professionally and finds it a little more convenient for general use too, esp. when I was living in India where a number of non-Christians use it. It’s just another way of “genericizing” a usage that stems from a religious tradition and still has religious roots but is now also widespread outside that religious tradition. No different from saying “Happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” to a stranger of unknown religious preferences. I agree that “BC/AD” (like “Merry Christmas”, IMO) is certainly not intrinsically offensive to non-Christians, but the alternative expression is definitely more inclusive, so I figure why not use it?
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