Android apps

In the past I've written about a lot of iOS apps. I did not write about Android apps simply because I didn't have an Android device. But I got a Motorola Moto G some time ago, so I might as well write about Android apps now.

Times on this site

Someone asked what decimal time format I prefer, so I figure it's time I explain again the ones used on this site.

Why am I here?

My last post was the first one in over a year, and it got three comments, which is more than I've seen in a very long time. It reminds me of the halcyon days of the 2000s.

10 hours a day, 10 days a week

I now have a decimal clock with 10 hours and French Republican wall calendar with 10 days a week. Instead 24/7 I can do 10/10!

As you can tell from the position of the hands, it's really a standard clock with a faux decimal face, so the hour hand goes around twice a day and the other hands like usual, but it looks cool. I used a gift card from my secret Santa to get the clock from Cafe Press and bought the calendar from Etsy. You can see more pictures on Twitter.

Duodi 22 Pluviôse an CCXXIV à 9 heures 53 minutes décimales t.m.P.
MJD 57429.947

Almanach national de France

I found a copies of the Almanach national de France on the Bibliothèque nationale de France web site. The edition for the second year of the Republican Calendar (l'an deuxieme), 1793-94, includes astronomical tables with decimal times. You can also see the times for the equinoxes and solstices and the phases of the moon written out.

For example, here is the Republican Calendar month of Nivose, in nouvelles heures, or "new times". It says

Solstice á 3 heures 20 minutes 64 secondes. HIVER.

Dernier Quartier á 5 h. 28 m.  Premier Quartier á 7 h. 10 m.

Nouvelle Lune á 9 h. 92 m.    Pleine Lune á 1 h. 53. min.

Hiver is winter. The phases (top to bottom then left to right) are last quarter, new moon, first quarter, full moon.

As I have pointed out before, I usually see decimal times today written with colons, although using colons was not common back then, but rather h and m. Using a decimal mark (which is the comma in French) would make more sense. Even today it is common in French to use h and m with standard time. Here you see a decimal time for the winter solstice written out in full with hours, minutes and seconds, corresponding to 3.2064 decimal hours, and the rest abbreviated, corresponding to 5.28, 9.92, 7.10 and 1.53 decimal hours.  Where there is room, minutes are abbreviated as min., or m. where there is not.

Therefore, I prefer using the old-style French notation, as shown here.

I can tell that most of the times are "true time", or local apparent solar time, which varies throughout the year in relation to mean time, and is shown by sundials. The last column shows when true solar noon occurs in local mean time. All times are relative to Paris.

Quartidi 14 Fructidor an CCXXII à 10 h. 84 m. t.m.P.
MJD 56900.077

Stardates and Julian Dates

I posted a year ago about a printed source I found stating that, as I had long suspected, stardates were based on Julian Dates.  I was reviewing the Memory Alpha page on stardates and came across some information on the subject, which had originally been posted on Star Trek Fact Check.  Apparently, the use of the Julian Day system was suggested by Kellam de Forest (not to be confused with DeForest Kelley) who worked as a script researcher.  Here are some notes he made on the (second) pilot:

(Page 2, Scene 3) 

But on star date 1312.4 – Astronomers already have adopted a method of dating which makes possible the counting of the number of days elapsed between widely separated observations called 'the Julian Day'. Today July 14, 1965 is 2,438,956 in Julian days.  A Julian cycle is 7,980 years, and the Julian day measurement would be scientifically authentic. Suggest “on Julian B 1312.4”.  This date would be August 5, 3271.

(Page 65, Scene 175) 

C-1277.1 to 1313.7 – We presume dates are in days, Kirk would only be 36 days  old.  For conventional dating suggest 3235 to 3271.  For Kirk’s birth date in Julian system figure would be in millions.  If desired, can be calculated.

He seems to be assuming that the show was set a thousand years in the future of when it was later established to occur.  Kirk is now considered to have been born in 2233, and the five-year mission took place in the late 2260s.  Since the Julian Period lasts 7980 years and the current one began in 4713 BCE, the next Julian Period begins on January 1 of the year 3268.  Thus, a Julian Date of 1312.4 would be 1,312 days, or about three-and-a-half years, later, on August 5, 3271, as he says.  Presumably "Julian B" refers to the next Julian Period, so the current one is Julian A.

It has long been a mystery what exactly C-1277.1 means on Kirk's tombstone.  Obviously, Kirk is more than 36 days old; more like 36 years.  Some have suggested that C stands for "captain", and that these are the dates of his command.  But perhaps it's for Julian C, indicating that the first stardate is in a different period than the second, although it's hard to infer the specifics.  The year 3235 lies between Julian days 2,902,620 and 2,902,984.  But it appears that somebody else picked the stardates, and de Forest was trying to retcon them as Julian Dates.

So we now have a genealogy going back to the French Revolution, starting with the Republican Calendar and decimal time, which passed into astronomy through Laplace, being combined with Herschel's Julian days, eventually to inspire the creation of stardates.

MJD 56598.357

Bonne année!

Today at 20:44 Universal Time (56557.8638), 8h 70m Paris mean decimal time, summer officially ends and fall begins in the Northern Hemisphere.  It was also on this date in 1792 the the First Republic was declared in Paris during the French Revolution. This marked the beginning of what was soon to be known as the Republican Era, which was to replace the Common Era of Anno Domini.  Each year of the new era began on the autumnal equinox.  The year was divided into 12 months of exactly 30 days, with five or six extra days at the end of the year treated as holidays. Instead seven-day weeks, each month was divided into three décades of ten days each. Each day was divided into ten hours, each decimal hours into 100 minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 seconds. Decimal time never caught on, although clocks were made and some used it for a while.  The astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace had a decimal watch and used decimal time in his work, and to this day astronomers still use decimal time to date the observations of stars and other objects, which became the inspiration for Star Trek's stardates. The ten-day weeks were abandoned in 1802, and the rest of the calendar was abolished by Napoléon in 1806. Events during the French Revolution are still referred to by their Republican calendar dates, and lobster thermidor gets its name from the 11th month. 

The Gregorian date, September 22, 2013, begins the year 222 of the Republican Era, the 1st day of the month of Vendémiaire.

MJD 56557.330

iPhone and iPad apps

Apps in this post:

CalRep by Jacques Lafon (MuppetJack)

Calendrier républicain by Hachette Livre

TI:ME by Alexander Clauss

Geek Time Pro by reizverstaerker medienwerkstatt OG

I have more apps for iPhone and iPad. Since I've been posting about the French Republican Calendar, I'll post about those first. I've talked earlier about Calendrier, Salut et Fraternité for iPhone, Salut et Fraternité for iPad and revol-di. Now we have some more.

CalRep by Jacques Lafon (MuppetJack) is a universal app (meaning it is designed for both iPhone and iPad). Originally released October 2, 2012 (56202, CCXXI/1/11), version 2.1 November 5, 2012 (56236, CCXXI/2/15).  It is free, with $1.99 in-app purchase for the "complete version".  I don't know what that means, and I'm not going to pay before I find out. In addition to the current date, you can convert between Gregorian and Republican dates for any year after I. I found one bug: all the Roman numerals for years are wrong on the selector, e.g. the current year 221 shows CCXX, although on the iPhone (but not iPad) the year is also correctly shown next to the picture. It starts in 1792 as "Yr (1) / Yr I (2) / Yr II (3)…" It sends daily alerts, which I like, and you can set what time to receive them, although for some reason you can't get them before 9 am, which is late for me. The dates are calculated according to what I call the continuous rule,  which is the fixed rule that leap days are added before (not after) most years divisible by 4, which is continuous with leap days during the Revolution, although those were determined by the equinox rather than a fixed rule, so sometimes it's a day off from the equinox date in some years. It does not show the decimal time, but it does show for each date the month's calendar girl and a picture of the rural calendar name, although for today it shows the barbel fish instead of the cornflower (barbeaux)! (See previous post.) It also has links to Wikipedia articles, although some of them don't exist, as such. Unlike some of the others, it does not show decimal time.

Update: The CalRep app is no more. It has been updated to version 3.0 and renamed UniCal - Universal Calendar, with a new icon, and now includes a bunch of other calendars, including Chinese, Mayan, Hebrew, Islamic and Persian. (What, no Julian/Orthodox?) The year number bug has been fixed.  Also, you can now get alerts as early as 5 am, although it does not always work for me.  The years appear to begin on the equinox.  I just noticed that only half the day-names appear; every other day says "Free Version", so now I guess I know what the difference is.  Maybe that's why I'm only getting half the daily notifications. 56477.131 (Sextidi 16 Messidor an CCXXI à 1 heure 37 minutes décimales t.m.P.)

Calendrier républicain by Hachette Livre is also a free universal app, released on September 3, 2012 (56173, CCXX/12/17).  It converts between Gregorian and Republican dates, and also converts French day names (like Barbeaux) to dates, although you have to scroll through an unsorted list of 366 names! However, like revol-di, it only works for dates during the Revolution, itself. But you can use it to find current dates if you add 220 to the year. It also does not show decimal time.

TI:ME by Alexander Clauss is a 99¢ universal app, released November 2, 2012 (56233). It displays the current time in any of the following formats: decimal, local standard (24-hour, 12-hour or AM/PM), standard in other timezones, Braille, hex, octal, Swatch Internet Time (.beat), NATO DTG, trig (degrees or radians), or with numbers represented by symbols on the periodic table of elements. There are various settings for each clock.

Geek Time Pro by reizverstaerker medienwerkstatt OG is a 99¢ iPhone app, released August 9, 2011 (55782). It displays the time in binary coded sexagesimal (lights or 1/0), binary coded decimal (BCD), hex time or decimal time.

Duodi 22 Prairial an CCXXI à 2 heures 42 minutes décimales t.m.P.

MJD 56453.236

Prairial app for Windows 8

Prairial by Laurent Rodier is a Windows 8/RT app that converts between the French Republican and Gregorian calendars. It displays the usual calendar girls for each month, and can display an entire month on one screen. It has live tile support, so it shows the date on your Windows Start screen. It also converts between standard and decimal times. It appears to display the current decimal time on a basic analog clock with 10 at the top. Since I don't have Windows 8 or RT, I have not tried it, but it's available for $1.49 in the Windows Market. It just happens that Prairial is the current month, the last month of spring.

Duodi 22 Prairial an CCXXI à 1 heure 24 minutes décimales t.m.P.
MJD 56453.117

Bonne année!

The autumnal equinox arrives today at 6h 23m Paris mean decimal time (56192.617) and that means it's Primidi 1 Vendémiaire l'an CCXXI, the first day of year 221 of the French Republican Calendar.  Even if you use a different method to calculate the date, you'll probably be celebrating today.  So happy new year!

MJD 56192.385

LogiClock the metric time app for Android

Android may finally be catching up to iOS.  LogiClock is a free and ad-free metric time app on Google Play by ResLabs.  It has an alarm clock, world clock, countdown time, stopwatch and a home-screen widget, and its design is based on the Zytlogge in Switzerland.

MJD 56181.977

What's Metric Time?

Thetechguy2000 is a pretty smart kid who has a new video up talking about metric time.  He has obviously read Lyle Zapatopi's A Guide to Metric Time, since he mentions Lyle's proposed quinto prefix for 10^-5, so 1 quintoday is equal to 0.864 second. He also talks about Swatch .beats Internet Time.

MJD56161.908 and 33 quintodays

Truncated Julian Day

For years I have seen two different definitions of Truncated Julian Day (TJD).  One said that it was the Julian Day with the first three digits truncated, so that it was never more than four digits.  The other said that it was a count of days midnight of JD 2,440,000, or May 24, 1968 (MJD 40000.0).  These two definitions resulted in the same number, until JD 2,450,000, or October 10, 1995 (MJD 50000.0).  By the first definition, TJD changed from 9999 to 0, and by the second to 10000.  I never knew the whole story, which definition is correct, and how it came to be, until now.

I just discovered the original proposal for TJD, NASA Technical Memorandum 80606, "A Grouped Binary Time Code for Telemetry and Space Applications" by A. R. Chi, published December 1979 by Goddard Space Flight Center.  It was defined as part of NASA time code PB-5:

The Day Count System - The four decimal digit day count system is derived from the truncation of the three most significant numbers of the present seven decimal digits of Julian Day Number (JDN), thus the name the Truncated Julian Day (TJD). TJD is arbitrar:ly chosen to begin from 0 at midnight May 24, 1969, (sic) and ends 9999 at midnight October 9, 1995 after which it recycles to zero. The repetition period is 27.4 years. A conversion table from TJD to calendar data in year, month, and day is given in Table II. The four decimal digits of a TJD number are represented by a 14-bit binary number.

By this definition, TJD is always a truncation of the Julian Day, and is never more than four digits, or 9999.  Since it is a binary field represented by 14 bits, it could not physically exceed 16383. Furthermore, this is an integer value.  The time of day is not represented as a decimal fraction, but by a count of seconds of the day from midnight, as well as optional milliseconds, microseconds and nanoseconds.

But that's not the whole story.  A modified time code called PB-5J was later defined with 16 bits for TJD, which allows for integers up to 65535, corresponding to dates up to October 28, 2147.  TJD values greater than 9999 can be found for the year 1995 and after, and a NASA web site converts to and from TJD for any positive value.

So there actually are two different definitions of Truncated Julian Day, one in PB-5 and the other in PB-5J, and it appears to me that the latter superseded the former.

TJD 56153/76300

Stupid people: another reason we need metric time

From here, via Images | These images are pretty sweet.  The video is funny, too.  And just under 2 minutes, too.

MJD 56135.076

Star Trek Online

I recently began playing the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Star Trek Online (STO), which is now free to play.  Since I am interested in stardates, I checked out how they were used in the game.  You can access them through your logs by hitting "J".  Your milestones in the game are all stamped with the real-life calendar date and a stardate.  This allowed me to determine the basis for their stardate calculations.  There is an STO stardate calculator already, but it's a little off, and does not make the basis clear.

The game is set in the year 2409, about 45 years after the beginning of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), and about 30 years after the last TNG movie, Star Trek: Nemesis.  The game was released in February 2, 2010 (55229), but the in-game year has remained 2409 two years later, and presumably was also 2409 during the beta testing in 2009, so it may be that the year was intended to be exactly 400 years in the future.

The current stardate in STO is about 90132.  From archived discussions online, I have determined that the stardates were around 87700 when it was released.  Coincidentally, according to the stardate calculator at TrekGuide.com, these are the stardates exactly 400 years in the future.  At least, according to my recollection of TrekGuide's formula, which counted exactly 1000 stardates per year, starting from May 25, 2322 (169296).

However, when I went to check on TrekGuide.com, the dates did not work out.  Instead of 90131 for this date in 2412, I get 86330.  What's going on, I wondered?  On examining TrekGuide's web page, I found that there are actually 918.23186 stardates per year, counting from July 5, 2318.  Could I have misremembered so badly?  Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I was able to determine that my recollection was, in fact, correct.  Sometime between July 2010 (55399.860509) and July 2011 (55759.40857) the page was changed.  (Update: It looks like it actually happened around April 7, 2011 (55658).)  IMHO, I believe that they're over-thinking it, and should have stuck with the original formula.  I doubt that Star Trek's creators were that accurate.

STO is, in fact, using the original TrekGuide stardate formula, as it was when the game was released, but shifted 400 years.  That means that I can calculate STO stardates for the present era as exactly 1000 per year, beginning from May 25, 1922.  This gives an alternative to the "contemporary" stardates that TrekGuide gives, which are based on air dates from 1987-2001.  Using TrekGuide's (original) TNG stardate calculator with dates exactly 400 years from now gives stardates at most a few hours off, so it just needs a little tweaking.

MJD 56119.713
Stardate 90132.02

New metric units

I received the following from James Strom, with my comments added:

Hi! I like to dabble in things like you have at your decimal time site. Decimal time is definitely an idea who's time has come.

Whose time has come?  I'd say it already came and went two centuries ago! 

But for it to be practical it must be compatible with any metric system in use. If the second were changed by anything other than by a power of ten then the cost of conversion would be enormous. The definitions of a joule, newton, ampere, volt, etc. would all have to be changed as well. Can you imagine having to multiply your wattage by 0.864 cubed to arrive at the new watts? A simple way around that is to simply keep the second either the same or 10 or times smaller. I would recommend the latter so as to allow a second to be equal to 1/864th of a milliday and for other reasons.

I agree that the metric system (SI) is a serious impediment to introducing new time units.  Redefining the second would be a practically impossible undertaking, regardless of whether it's by a power of ten.  In fact, with today's technology it's just about as easy to convert decimally as otherwise.  And you cannot simply change unit values while keeping the same names, or nobody would ever know if you were talking about the old or new units.  Remember that everything in the world for hundreds of years has been recorded using essentially the same second.  Likewise for other units, although not for as long.  Creating all new units with the same names, even if they're a factor of 10 different, would create chaos.

I have noticed that if Greenwich is used as the prime meridian then 10 time zones can be created which fit very neatly with the continents. So forget Swatch's idea.

You apparently mean Swatch eliminating time zones.  You do not say why we should favor 10 time zones over one, or 24.  We may as well reform everything at once.  Business today is international.  So is my family.  It seems to me that time zones one-tenth day (2.4 hours) wide lack the advantages of smaller one-hour zones, while being only halfway to a single one for the world.

Any modification of our current system should have as a high priority ease of convertibility. The system described below has that in mind. In fact, it could be used by anyone right now without any trouble.

There is nothing that is as easy to convert as no change at all.  You need to have major advantages to outweigh the disadvantage of any conversion, no matter how easy it might be. And I don't really think that your proposal would be as easy as you claim for those who are currently using these units.

It won't be necessary for any international organization to get everyone else to agree to the change for it to work.

Who would use it, then? 

It also assumes that lower case letters will someday be eliminated.

Why?  That would eliminate half the available symbols for units and prefixes.  It would also require everyone on the Internet to SHOUT all the time. 

I've devised a modification of the current metric system that I think would be simpler, more intuitive, and easy to convert to. It would be similar to the change from the old cgs system (centimeter-gram-second) to the mks system (meter-kilogram-second).

These two systems used different names for nonequivalent units.  It was also a big pain in the ass to change, and not everyone has, yet.

As it is now the basic unit of mass requires a prefix (kilo) and doesn't correspond with weight.

The kilogramme was originally defined as a unit of weight.  The definitions of mass and weight were separated after it was realized that an object's mass is relatively constant, but it's weight is not.  My sisters in Colorado gain weight every time they come to visit me on the coast, but their masses remain the same.  (Unless my Mom is cooking.)  Scales do not actually measure mass, but the force of gravity acting on a particular mass.  However, for everyday use we can use our weight to approximate our mass.  To those relatively few professionals who have to use units of force to measure weights, it is advantageous that mass and weight have different values, lest they get confused.

The unit of density is, unlike almost all other measurement systems, is not even close to that of water but, in fact, less than that of air. This makes it difficult to visualize them.

The SI unit of density is kg/m³.  Water is 1000 kg/m³, or 1 t/m³ = 1 g/cm³ = g/ml.  I have no problem visualizing a cubic meter of water, or of a milliliter (cc).

On the other hand, if a system were devised that made the unit of acceleration close to the force of gravity on earth then it would be easy to picture it. Also, weight would become almost synonymous with mass. This would make it easy to imagine force in terms of these units. And if the unit of density were the same as that of water then there would be the obvious benefits.

I don't have a problem "picturing" these things, nor do I see how that is necessary.  I already weigh myself in pounds or kg, not 780 newtons.  I imagine newtons only when measuring small things in a lab.  (Which I have not done in decades.)  The benefits are not obvious to me.

This is what I propose:

1) The new unit of mass would be called a ton but would have the same mass as a kilogram.

We already have several different ton units causing confusion, and you want to add one that is not even close? 

2) The "new" meter would be equal to one tenth of an "old" meter or a decimeter.

Again, I don't see the benefit of changing the value by an order of magnitude. 

3) The day would be divided into 1,000 minutes. Each minute, in turn, would be divided into 864 seconds. Thus the "new" second would be equivalent to one tenth of an "old" second.

A compromise that has all the problems of both, and the benefits of neither! 

I won't go through the rest, since I am not interested in changing the metric system.  That ship sailed a long time ago.  It took a lot of time and trouble to get the entire world to accept the current metric system, and now that it's done, there is no advantage to massively change it now, even if it's not perfect.  We have discussed these issues ad nauseum on this site in the past.

4) The ampere would remain the same and would be defined as the amount of current that would produce a force of 2X10^-8 Newtons between two wires, etc., in terms of the new units. In other words; the ampere would be 1/10,000th of the value that it have if it were defined by the basic three units alone. That's an improvement over the current system that requires division by the square root of ten million.

5) The unit of angle would be 1/1,000th of a circumference. This would align it with the units of time. The earth, in relation to the sun, would rotate one degree per minute.

6) The unit of temperature would be defined as 1/1,000th of the triple point of water. A celsius-like system could be used as well so that water would freeze at 0 and absolute zero would be -1000.

7) The unit for amount of substance would not change except for its name. It shall be called a quant instead of a mole and be represented by a Q instead of mol.

8) The unit of luminosity would be equal to one joule per second per steradian in terms of the new units and be renamed the young (after the scientist, of course).

Each of the units shall be represented by one letter only without regard to upper or lower case status.

The prefixes shall follow this rule as well.

Thus there will be 26 common units and a like number of prefixes.

Ratio refers to the ratio of the size of the "new" units to that of the "old" ones in the mks system.

Unit       Symbol     Quantity          Formula      Ratio  

Ton                T       Mass                     T            1            
Meter             M      Length                  M          0.1
Are                R       Area                 M^2        0.01
Liter               L       Volume             M^3       0.001
Second           S       Time                    S          0.1      
Hertz              Z       Frequency          1/S           10
Einstein          E       Velocity              M/S            1
Gal                 G       Acceleration   M/S^2          10
Bole                B       Momentum     T*M/S           1
Newton           N       Force         T*M/S^2         10
Planck            P        Action         T*M^2/S        0.1
Joule              J        Energy    T*M^2/S^2           1      
Ampere          A       Current                  A            1
Coulomb         C       Charge              A*S         0.1
Weber            W      Flux                    J/A           1
Volt                V       Potential              J/C         10
Henry             H       Inductance          W/A          1
Farad             F       Capacitance         C/V      0.01
Siemens         S       Conductance        A/V        0.1
Ohm               O      Resistance           V/A         10
Gauss             U       Strength             A/M         10
Maxwell          X       Intensity             V/M        100
Degree           D       Angle                     D       0.36
Kelvin             K       Temperature           K  0.27316
Quant             Q      Amount                   Q           1
Young             Y      Luminosity               Y     6,830  


Symbol  Prefix  Multiple    

V                      10^33      
W                     10^30
X                      10^27
Y          Yotta     10^24
Z          Zetta     10^21
E            Exa     10^18
P           Peta     10^15
T          Tera      10^12
G          Giga       10^9
M         Mega      10^6
K            Kilo       10^3
H         Hecto       10^2
D          Deka       10^1
S           Deci      10^-1
C          Centi      10^-2
L           Milli       10^-3
U         Micro      10^-6
N          Nano      10^-9
B           Pico     10^-12
F        Femto     10^-15    
A           Atto     10^-18
O         Zepto     10^-21
J          Yocto     10^-24
Q                      10^-27
I                       10^-30
R                      10^-33

This system is meant to work with decimal time, a reformed calendar, and the eventual elimination of lower case letters.

But that is the subject of another email.

(Don't worry about copyright or anything. I don't care who gets credit for what. I only bring this up because while googling your name I found some idiot who was trying to take credit for coming up with an obvious idea that dated back to the French Revolution. There's all sorts out there.)

MJD 56115.995

Mouvement souverainiste du Québec

I received the following:

I was thinking, as you know I live in Canada, and interestingly I now live in Montreal, Quebec. As you may or may not know, this has always been a hot spot of cultural debate (i.e Anglos vs Francos) and quite frankly the Francos are winning. In fact it wouldn't be to much a stretch of the imagination to say Quebec may form an independent country by next year. Whether I stay or not is another question, but I was thinking, if Quebec goes rouge (sic), why don't they re-install La calendrier Française Révolutionnaire as well as Temps FR (20hrs per day!) it would truly make Quebec a distinct society.

My answer is that Quebec was a British territory at the time of the Revolution, so it never used the Republican Calendar nor decimal time (10 hours, not 20).  France, itself, has not used the calendar in two centuries (except for a few radicals briefly in Paris in 1871) and never really accepted decimal time.  Given that 24/60/60 time is universal in every country on earth, not just Anglo ones, and the Gregorian calendar nearly so, especially in Catholic countries, it is highly improbable that there would be any interest whatsoever.

However, I am not Québécois and have only been there once, so I do not wish to presume to speak for them.  Please feel free to comment below.

Quartidi 14 Messidor an CCXX à 6 heures 82 minutes décimales t.m.P.
MJD 56111.676

MetricTimeAngle.com

I originally started this site to sort out all the various decimal time and metric time proposals.  I imagine that in the past many people thought up the idea in isolation, rarely getting much notice, until the Internet and World Wide Web came along and then suddenly there was a plethora of web sites devoted to different versions of decimal time.  I collected all the proposals, compared and discussed them with others.  It sure seemed like a lot of people were interested in the idea, and many of them were promoting their own ideas.  Then it stopped.  It seems that once the information was out there, there was no reason for people to reinvent it.  Instead, they could just read about it on Wikipedia, or on sites like mine.  They could learn that it had already been tried hundreds of years ago, that it is currently in use by scientists, that there have already been many proposals to reform the way we tell time, and that not much is likely to change any time soon.

But occasionally, a new one pops up.  MetricTimeAngle.com defines a new metric unit, the earth-second or esecond (e), equal to the French decimal second, or 0.000 01 day.  "Earth clocks" divide the day into 100 ke (kilo-earth-seconds) equal to 14.4 standard minutes.  This just happens to be the traditional Chinese name for the same interval, although this is not mentioned.  It is also equal to de Rey-Pailhade's cé.  "Earth Time" starts from midnight UTC with 00.00, with no local time zones.  He also defines new degrees for angles and coordinates, dividing the earth's circumference into 100 kd.

The author says:

get a 100 ke earth clock. You may download one from www.MetricTimeAngle.com, and very soon your mobile phone company will provide you a downloadable one. And the best news is that a couple of clock manufacturers have started designing these new earth clocks and watches that you can buy shortly. Watch the news at www.MetricTimeAngle.com.

Will the world embrace this proposal for metric time and angle? Based upon hundreds of years of very similar proposals, I'd say not likely.  Of course, when the mobile phone apps are published I will post about it here, along with all the existing decimal time apps.

MJD 56094.827

Decimal time format

The previous post includes a representation of decimal time with the units (decimal hours, minutes and seconds) separated by colons (:), just as is usually done with standard time.  I see this with most decimal time clocks.  Not having any other model, I initially wrote decimal times this way, myself.  However, this makes it difficult to distinguish decimal time from standard time.

Also, when referring to decimal time as used during the French Revolution, this format is probably inappropriate.  I do not know when it started being used, but in old books I do not see it, either for decimal or sexigesimal times.  Often the number of hours and minutes were written out, as in "eight hours in the morning" or "twelve hours and thirty minutes".  When abbreviated, the time was typically given with the initials of the units following their number, e.g. "12 h. 30 m."  Sometimes a period was included, sometimes not, and other times a superscript was used, e.g. "12^h 30^m".  I see this historically in both English and French, and it seems to be still in use in France, although usually without the last unit, so that the "h" acts as a separator, e.g. "12h30".

In revolutionary France, when decimal times were written out, the same was done but with "décimales" added after the last unit, such as "à 5 heures décimales" or "à 7 heures 80 décimales.  I also found abbreviated times such as "à 6 h. 67 décimales".  A few decades later, French decimal time enthusiast Joseph Charles Francois de Rey-Pailhade provided superscripted examples such as "3^hd 93^md".

So I think that when expressing decimal times, at least when referring to their historical use in France, that it should probably be written in one of the ways shown above.  This is what I have done with the decimal time on

the right of this page, under the Republican Calendar date.

MJD 56045.233
Nonidi 9 Floréal an CCXX
à 2 h. 39 m. d. t.m.P.

Metric Clock Gadget

For once I'm not going to post about a smartphone app, but a Windows desktop gadget.  A gadget is an applet that sits on your Windows desktop and displays dynamic information, such as time, calendar, weather, etc.  Recently I found a new one named Metric Clock by Dr. Igor "Igogo" Bushin in Ukraine.  The description is copied from Wikipedia and Minkukel.  The gadget basically displays the current date and local decimal time in h:mm:ss format.  Options include changing the size, hiding the title, copyright and "date sting" (sic), and changing colors for all elements.  The gadget is compatible with Windows versions from XP to 8, and is free, with a request to donate on the web site.  His late cat also has a web site.

MJD 56045.171 (8:79:00 PDT)