Decimal Time: March 2023

2023/03/31

Space Time Zone

With NASA going back to the moon, Elon Musk going to Mars, and various other countries and corporations planning lunar and planetary trips and new space stations, International scientists and engineers have been debating how they will tell time in space, since there that are no days, months, and years, let alone time zones, and clocks move at slightly different speeds in other inertial reference frames.There is agreement that it is important for communication, cooperation, and safety that there be a single time standard everyone, a Universal Time for the solar system.

Happy Julian Day!

Happy Julian Day

2023/03/20

Morning Croissant

Morning Croissant is an independent publication launched in Fructidor CCXXX (August 2022 in vulgar time) by Carina Magyar. I provide cartomancy readings each day based on the French Republican calendar. I use different card decks each day as prompted by the previous day's reading, slowly building a Celtic Cross every 10-day décade.

Stardate composition

Captain's log, stardate 78207.7.

I was able to reverse engineer the first Picard stardate, 78183.10, to within one milliyear. However, I'm not sure about the fractional part. I'm just going to assume that it works the same way it did for Kirk and younger Picard, and that the integer, left of the decimal point, represents decimal milliyear, and the fraction, right of the decimal, represents the decimal time of day.

Formula for 2023 stardates

Captain's log, stardate 78207.68

Just convert from decimal Unix time to decimal milliyears.

SD = 1000*(U/S/L + D)

Stardate epoch

Captains log, stardate 78201.03.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the new stardate. The closest I could get was that, for 2023, it is based on when the episode aired in New York, at 3 am.

Stardates on this site

Captain's log, stardate 78199.692

I’ve decided to use the new Picard system for stardates on this site. The exact algorithm isn’t given us, so I am matching stardates on the Today’s Stardate app, with the 1945 custom epoch, to make it more useful. Even then, his stardates are slightly different from my calculations, so I had to fudge a bit.

Captain’s log, 78194.44.

I know of only one stardate app for Apple iOS, and that’s Todays Stardate by Rolando Pusineri.

Calendar names

The French calendar has several names:

Republican Calendar

Calendar of Reason
French Revolutionary Calendar

Romme calendar

New calendar

Jacobin calendar

Equinox calendar

Translation

How would the French calendar be translated into English? In The French Revolution: a History by Thomas Carlyle, published in 1837, he wrote,

“one might say, in mixed English, Vintagearious, Fogarious, Frostarious: these are our three Autumn months...Snowous, Rainous, Windous make our Winter season…Buddal, Floweral, Meadowal, are our Spring season...(dor being Greek for gift) Reapidor, Heatidor, Fruitidor, are Republican Summer”

I think that a better translation for autumn would be: Vintageary, Fogary, Frostary.

Captain’s log, stardate 76656.3. We have another stardate sighting. On the second episode of season three, there is a surveillance photo of a Romulan terrorist with a date-stamp of 70398.2812. That puts it around May 25, 2393, at 06:45.

Picard’s Stardates

Captains log, stardate 76656.0. The showrunner of Star Trek: Picard, Michael Chabon, has said that the show would not be using stardates, for reasons. Last night I watched the first episode of season 3, and was surprised to hear a stardate! But I was not the stardate of the episode, but 43996.2, which meant that it was from 2366, the end of season 2 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That was during the Battle of Wolf 359. I looked at the shirt I was wearing. It says, “Never Forget — Wolf 359, 43989.1”! Even if I didn’t remember, I could have known that it aired in mid-1994 from the stardate.

Decimal Watch competition

Most assume that the French gave up on decimal time in year III (1795). However, I was reading some old newspapers, found, which I’ve translated. Notice that this is late in year IV (1796). I’ll also point out that some places used decimal time until 1800, after Napoleon’s Coup of Brumaire.

I’ll also point out that 1 kg of gold is twice the size of an Olympic gold medal, but that’s only gold-played because gold is too expensive, about $60,000.00 per kilogram.

JOURNAL OF PARIS.

(BY THE C.s RŒDERER AND CORANCEZ.)

Quartidi 14 MESSIDOR, the IVth year of the French Republic, one & indivisible.

Saturday, JULY 2, 1796 (old style.)

I came across this article. I had read that it was traditional to name children in the church after their name-day. The Catholic Church has a saint’s name or holiday for every day of the year. There was a decree that children should be named in the city hall according to the new calendar, as part of the campaign of secularism and anticlericalism. I’ve read many birth certificates, but have not noticed any Republican names. The law of 11 germinal year XI (April 1, 1803) stipulated that only the names of illustrious people and those used in the Catholic calendar could be received as first names in the civil status registers. Names from the Republican calendar were thus prohibited.

ISO 8601 hours

I have added ISO 8601 dates with decimal hours to the Conversions page. ISO 8601 is the international standard for representation of dates and times in electronic communication. The main part defines a descending order of units from most to least significant, from largest to smallest, that is, year-month-dateThour: minute: second, for example, 2023-03-09T06:05:00.

I looked this site up on the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. I don’t recall when I started out, but the oldest archive is from 2001, and the site was already pretty extensive. I started building websites in 1995, so I think that it started soon after. Beck then, I focused more on vanity projects, of which there were many. It seemed like every crank had they their own system of “metric time.” I think that the publication online of solid information, especially on Wikipedia, made people realize that they weren’t original. I first started learning in the late 70s.

This site has come a long way since then, but I think it has a good start.

18 Ventôse year CCXXXI, pimpernel day @ 3^h 84^m 93^sPMT

2023/03/08

Work days

One of the common objections to decimal time is that ten isn’t evenly divisible by three, so how are workers going to have three shifts a day, which currently makes for eight hours per shift? How will they have the same number of workdays with ten-day weeks?

Check out this article from an automotive website,

Analog clock

You may have noticed that there is now an analog decimal clock on every page. I also made a full-page clock, perfect for a desk or nightstand. I wrote my first virtual, decimal, analog desk clock in the early 1980s in BASIC on an Atari 800. I remember that the computer’s internal clock was a 3-byte register that incremented 60 times per second, or in one “jiffy.” Three bytes meant that it would roll over every 3.238 days to 0. There was no battery, so it had to be reset every time you turned it on. The was also no Internet to set it automatically. It was as primitive as can be!

Decimal meetings

In another century, an earlier version of this site would host web meetings of decimal time enthusiasts from around the Globe, at odd times like 51234.6, which would be 14:24 GMT. It was guaranteed that somebody was losing sleep! It was very primitive, text only, no audio or video. I created our own chatroom back then, with decimal timestamps, and each user would see their own favorite format, such as Republican, Julian Date, etc. Some invented their own. Now, we can use great online conferencing platforms, like Zoom.

So, what do you think?

Captain’s log, stardate 60009.3.

Republican wall calendar

Ever wish you had the Republican calendar hanging on your wall? Well, you can!

Dates and times here

All Republican calendar dates on this site are according to The Original Calendar, with years starting on the day of equinox, unless specified otherwise. I know that some prefer the revised calendar, which would be easier to use, but TOC was the only one actually used.