phoebe nix.

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

And then, on the other hand, you've got "Shockingly, this life-altering treatment that massively impacts how the patient is perceived by others in all facets of life is primarily supported by observational studies, as opposed to the enormous violations of bodily autonomy and human dignity necessary to perform a true randomized control trial. We recommend that treatment ceases immediately because you don't understand how evidence-based medicine works." And that becomes a linchpin of the politics of multiple European countries' trans healthcare politics for the next several years.

It was invented by one person for a specific purpose - to have a universalizable way of establishing historical dates, rather than having to deal with dynastically based date systems. And it was a really good idea. This is not surprising, since Bede is basically the father of Historiography. He also is the guy who gave us the notion of Primary Sources. Bede is amazing.

When a guy revolutionizes the entire way calendaring is done, he has the right to set his zero point wherever he pleases.

People have pointed out that one problem with CE notation is that it presents itself as neutral when it is exactly the same system as AD. What exactly is "common" about this era? The zero point doesn't become neutral just by effacing its source.

(Also BCE is nonsense. Just use negative numbers)

It makes sense for scholarly tradition to not want to be tied to a specific religion. But scholarly tradition is very enthusiastic about being tied to earlier scholarly tradition. The convention of AD was established by a scholar for a scholarly purpose. We know his name. We know what he was doing, and why, and how. And he was doing it better than anybody else. That is worth honoring.

Rather than pretending that it's a neutral system, acknowledge that it's not. It's not some naturally occurring "common era," it's the system developed by Bede, centered around dates that were important to him personally (but which he intended to be universally applicable).

I have been informed that Bede notation may in fact have been first devised by Dionysus the Humble of Scythia to calculate the date of Easter more accurately. But my broader point stands.