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Swatch no longer promotes its Internet Time beats, but I found an archived version of its Swatch Internet Time page from 2002.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