Grub-hoe

Practically every day in the French Republican Calendar is named after a plant, animal, mineral, or farm tool, collectively known as the “rural calendar.” Today, Décadi, Brumaire 20, is being reported on Twitter, er, X, and the various apps as being “Grub-hoe” day. Grub-hoe? What is that? How is it different from a regular hoe? 

Wall calendars

Romme’s calendar

There were historically two French Republican calendars:

1. Gilbert Romme's original calendar, which was the only one legally recognized, began each year on the day of the autumn equinox, causing leap years to occur haphazardly, according to Romme’s method. 
2. The reformed calendar, which never reached the National Convention, began each year according to fixed mathematical rules proposed by Jean Baptiste Delambre, with leap years occurring on a regular schedule, similar to the Gregorian calendar. The reason that the reformed calendar did not reach the Convention was that on that same day, Romme was sentenced to the guillotine and committed suicide. 

Stardates explained

I ran across this video that sounds a lot like me. It talks about different methods to produce stardates in the present. 

Reformed conversions

I added a date picker to the conversions page recently and I was just testing it, and noticed that the results for the French reformed calendar were off. The results are correct for 2005–2039, but outside that range sometimes they aren’t. I think I just forgot that I didn’t work out the algorithm, and since many dates were correct, I didn’t notice. I could just let it be and accept that there is a limited range of valid dates, or I could start over from scratch, since that would probably be easier than integrating new code into the existing function. In fact, I retested the same function with the original French Republican Calendar, and it works correctly, which is surprising, since it has to calculate the date of the equinox for every year, which seems harder than adding a day every four years. 

Swatch Internet Time

Swatch no longer promotes its Internet Time beats, but I found an archived version of its Swatch Internet Time page from 2002. See the brochure.

Flash clock

An archive of the clock from an old version of this site. Original page.  

Lavoisier

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, in a convocation letter to the members of the Commission for weights and measurements, for October 13, 1793, (22 vendémiaire an II) expressed himself in terms of the new regulations: “We remind you, dear citizen, that the Commission for weights and measurements shall meet, from now on, on the 2nd and 5th and 8th of each decade, at 7 decimal hours exactly (4 hours 48 minutes in the afternoon in the old style).”

An interesting use of decimal time. Note that he gave an exact decimal time, then translated that into “old style,” rather than the other way around. He also refers to the décade, rather than the week. Meetings are to be held every third day with a three-day weekend. 

This was when decimal time and the calendar were first introduced. He died in prison shortly after that, in the unfortunate snuffing of a leading light of science, another victim of the times. 

Current stardates

Captain’s log, stardate 78862.1.  

Amongst the date and time formats I’ve supported on this site is the current stardate. But since there is no consensus or single version that is accepted, I’ve gone back and forth with which to use. Initially, I used Modified Julian Dates, but then I started using TrekGuide’s formula, as that was consistent with when TNG, DS9, and Voyager episodes aired, but those episodes haven’t aired for decades. 

Other decimal times

We tend to think of decimal time as a division of the day, but there are other bases, too. 

 Many companies use decimal time for payroll or hourly billing, with hours as the base, divided into hundredths. So 6:30 PM is written as 18.50. Punch clocks like this are common. 

 Astronomers sometimes divide years into decimals such as 2023.789. 

Computers often use Unix time, which counts seconds, sometimes divided into milliseconds and microseconds, like 1699042927.711. 

 So there is already a whole world of decimal time already in use!