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

Sternzeit

I have written about Sternzeit by Sebastian Bothe before.  It is an iPhone app for calculating stardates.  It has just been updated to version 2.2.  For some reason it requires the new iOS 6, which means that if you don't upgrade you cannot use it.  (Hey, Sebastian, just because there's a new iOS does not mean that everyone needs or wants to upgrade!)  New in this version, they months are all in German instead of English.  There has been new text added, in need of spellcheck, explaining that the stardate is negative because it is based upon a future date.  Then they give you another date that you can use instead, but it's also in the future, so either way you have to use a negative stardate.  You can choose between 2323 and 2063.  The former is the year from which The Next Generation counted their stardates.  2063 I guess was chosen because it was the year the movie, Star Trek: First Contact, was set in, although they do not explain why this would be the base for stardates a half-century earlier.  So instead of -301275.75, you can have it say -50275.76.  And, in addition to email, SMS and Twitter, you can share to Facebook or save to your camera roll, which creates an image of a postcard with the stardate printed on it.

And I can vouch that it has been updated to fit on my new iPhone 5's 10 cm screen!

MJD 56192.404

Stardates again

I recently was reading Star Trek Chronology by Michael and Denise Okuda, which has some information about stardates.  They worked on all the Star Trek TV series, except the original one.  On page 95 they state:

Editor's Note: The year 2323 works out as the zero point for the system of stardates developed for Star Trek: The Next Generation, assuming that the beginning of year 2364 (the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation) was stardate 41000, and that stardates progress at 1000 units per year. In other words, under the Next Generation system of stardates, January 1, 2323 would seem to correspond to stardate 0. This probably shouldn't be taken too seriously, because Star Trek's stardates have never been too internally consistent, but we're mentioning it here because it's kinda fun. (No, we don't know how these stardates relate to the stardates used in the original Star Trek series or the movies, nor do we know what stardates would have been for years between the movies and this point. See the Appendix I [Regarding stardates] for more information on stardates.)

As they said, "stardates have never been too internally consistent", which is why some speculate that stardate 41000 was in May or that there were less than 1000 units per year.  For instance, on the next page they say:

Editors' confession: In "Dark Page" (TNG), an entry in Lwaxana's journal dated stardate 30620.1 is established to be during the year in which she got married, 2328. Unfortunately, under the  Star Trek: The Next Generation system of stardates (which allocates 1,000 stardate units per year, and puts the beginning of the year 2364 at stardate 41000) the beginning of the year 2328 should be around stardate 5000.  Star Trek technical consultant (and Chronology co-author) Mike Okuda decided that a four-digit stardate would be confusing since this sounds like an Original Series number, so he arbitrarily picked 30620, even though it is not consistent with stardates used elsewhere in the show.

In "Appendix I: Regarding Stardates" they give more information, such as the fact that "As with the original series, an increase of a single unit within an episode corresponds to about 24 hours, even though this is inconsistent with a 365-day year."  They also relate a theory that stardates in The Original Series represented months and days from the beginning of a mission, so 1312 indicated thirteen months and twelve days, and 5928 was about five years, although there were plenty of stardates which would have more than 31 days, as in "Errand of Mercy", which took place between stardates 3198.4 and 3201.7.  Assuming 100-day months, that would be more than twelve years spread over 46 months.

In Star Trek 30 Years Special Collector's Edition, it states that Gene Roddenberry "borrowed the notion from the Julian date currently used by astronomers...Roddenberry borrowed the five-digit [Modified] Julian date, shortening it to four digits and renaming it 'stardate.'" I've long suspected that this was the case, due to the strong similarity, such as the subtle use of decimal time: "For Star Trek, Roddenberry added a single digit after the decimal point (50335.2, for example) to represent one of 10 time increments in a 24-hour period."

There was an earlier work, Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology by Stanley and Fred Goldstein, published the same month as Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979.  Based upon references in The Original Series, the show was set in the early 23rd century, 2207-2210.  In the 1980s FASA made a game called Star Trek: The Role Playing Game which used this Chronology.  They created "reference stardates" in the form C/YYMM.DD, where C is the century (actually the second digit of the year), YY is the last two digits of the year, MM is the month and DD the day, so January 1, 2000, was 0/0001.01, and the episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before" was 2/0705, or May 2207.  Stardates in the 1900s are negative, so this episode aired on -1/6609.22, which was also the day my sister was born.  Of course, this early Chronology was ignored when TNG was made, and TOS was then set to about 300 years after it was produced.

I posted last month about stardates in Star Trek Online.  With a bunch of math and experimentation, and with a little help from the webmaster of STO Academy, I figured out exactly how they work.

There are several stardate calculators online which do not all agree with each other. I recognized right off that STO's are almost the same as the TNG stardates on TrekGuide.com. This page was changed last year, but the archived page says:

there are exactly 1,000 Stardates per year...Stardate 00000.0 began on May 25, 2322, at 00:00 hours.

Subtract 400 years and you get the following STO stardates:

Stardate: 87000.00 Earthdate: 5/25/2009 12:00:00am UTC

Stardate: 88000.00 Earthdate: 5/25/2010 12:00:00am UTC

Stardate: 89000.00 Earthdate: 5/25/2011 12:00:00am UTC

Stardate: 90000.00 Earthdate: 5/24/2012 9:28:06am UTC

Wait, what? This threw me at first. This year is different from previous years. That is because it's a leap year, so instead of 365 days there are 366, but there are still exactly 1000.00 stardates from January 1 through December 31. That means that the stardates run a little slower than previous years, so instead of 2.74 per day there are 2.73, or about one second slower per 0.01 stardate.

The one thing that does stay constant is that every year starts on xx605.48:

Stardate: 87605.48 Earthdate: 1/1/2010 12:00:17am UTC

Stardate: 88605.48 Earthdate: 1/1/2011 12:00:17am UTC

Stardate: 89605.48 Earthdate: 1/1/2012 12:00:17am UTC

Stardate: 90605.48 Earthdate: 1/1/2013 12:00:17am UTC

That is because there are 221 days from May 25 to January 1, and 221/365 = 0.60548, even though it's a leap year. So with this information, you should be able to use stardates anywhere, not just in the game.

MJD 56154.199

STO 90226.24

FASA 0/1208.14

Update (56158.121): I should include an actual formula for Star Trek Online stardates:

1000×(day-of-year/length-of-year + year - 1923 + 221/365)

Where day-of-year is the number of days from January 1, including the time as a fractional day, found by dividing the hour by 24, e.g. January 2 at 12:00 UTC is 2.5.  Length-of-year is 365 in common years, 366 in leap years.  221 is the number of days from May 25 to the end of the year.  So for August 19, 2012 at 02:50:54 UTC: 1000×(232.11868/366 + 2012 - 1923 + 0.60548) = 90239.68.

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

Captain Picard Day

I was listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe today and the first thing they talked about was Captain Picard Day.  This refers to an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which there is an annual event to celebrate the ship's Captain, Jean-Luc Picard.  Since the episode occurs on stardate 47457.1, this was used as a basis to determine the calendar date.  If you know anything about stardates, you know that there is no reliable way to convert between stardates and calendar dates, although there are a number of different formulas used by trekkers.

Apparently, someone calculated this stardate to correspond with 2370 June 16 (186850), so every June 16 is Captain Picard Day.  Of course, someone else figured it is November 4 (186991), while others apparently go by the television air date on 1994 January 10 (49362).  There are plenty of other possibilities, e.g. March 11 (186754).  Plus, the stardate was given later in the episode, and probably refers to a date several days after Captain Picard Day.

If we accept, as most do, that there are 1000 stardates in a year, and that 47xxx represents one year, then 47457 is 45.7% from the beginning of that year, or about 167 days.  If the stardate year starts on January 1 and 47xxx represents 2370, then day 167 would be June 16.  Of course, this contradicts some references in various episodes, so the stardate year may begin on some other date of the calendar.  For instance, 54868.6 must take place on 2378 April 6 (189702), suggesting that 47000 is 2369 September 10 (186572).  There are some who even dispute that 1000 stardates are exactly one year long.

At the risk of sparking a holy war, I would say that since it's all bullshit, it does not matter what date we pick.  Happy Captain Picard Day!

MJD 56095.1

Sternzeit

I have posted before about stardates and stardate apps for iPhone. A free new app was released in November (55877) named Sternzeit, which is German for "stardate", by Sebastian Bothe. Originally the US AppStore description was in German, although text within the app was in English, but the description has now been translated.

Version 2 was released today (56015), which fixes an issue with not being able to select the year. You can now select dates in any year to convert to a stardate. Initially there was a bug which caused it to revert to the current date every 30 seconds, but it's working now for me.

The unique feature of this app is that it gives you the ability to share the stardate via Twitter, email or SMS, with a default message like, "Captains's log, stardate : -310757.56". You can also follow other users of the app on Twitter via a hash tag from within the app. I appear to be the first tweeter.

The real problem I have is that the algorithm he uses starts counting from the year 2323, which means that all stardates in the current century are negative, as well as being six digits, unlike the ones on TV, which were four or five digits, and lack the minus sign. It's fine if you want to find the stardate Capt. Janeway brought Voyager back to the Alpha Quadrant in the year 2378, but it's not what I want in my tweets. I know that the "algorithm...is known throughout the net", but it was devised specifically for the 24th century, and doesn't even work for Capt. Kirk's time, let alone ours. There are plenty of other stardate algorithms on the Net, like the contemporary date algorithm at TrekGuide.com. (I don't recommend the Andrew Main algorithm, used by Google Calendar.)  IRL astronomers have their own way of dating star observations, which looks a lot like the stardates on The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager.  And of course, the latest version of Star Trek simply uses the year number with a decimal.

At least he no longer states that 2323 was the year of the first warp-flight, when every Trekkie knows it was nearly three centuries earlier, in 2063. How did he think Kirk got around in the 2200s?

Sadly, I can't update to the new Sternzeit version on my iPhone 4S because for some reason the app requires the new iOS 5.1, and I am stuck on 5.0.1 because I'm jailbroken. Funny, I've updated scores of other apps this month and none of them require 5.1. I had to try it on my iPad, so of course it looks like crap because it's designed only for iPhone, for some reason.

MJD 56016.339

eBooks

I have been waiting for electronic books my whole life.  I've always been a big sci-fi fan, and it only made sense to me that e-books would be superior in every way to their paper counterparts.  The very first episode of Star Trek made with Captain Kirk, which first aired the day my little sister was born, showed characters reading e-books and other documents.  Granted, in that particular episode they were reading relatively bulky monitors attached to the wall, rather than what we would call an e-reader or tablet, but in later episodes handheld tablets are used, some of which were touch-sensitive, and others which used a stylus.  The monitors worked with removable cards, referred to as "tapes", although it was not clear whether they contained literal tape inside, and sometimes documents are transferred directly from the ship's computer.  There are plenty of other works of science fiction which also depict e-books.

The first time I saw a dedicated e-book reader in real life was about 20 years ago, when I was on a flight sitting next to a man using a prototype, which he said the company he worked for was developing.  I don't know whatever happened to that particular device, but I know that a number of portable e-book readers have been produced over the years, which did not succeed for various reasons.  E-books themselves, however, could be read on personal computers, and as laptop computers became smaller, they became more convenient for reading e-books, until dedicated reading devices and tablets finally made e-books more convenient than the paper kind.

I always knew that this day would come.  Others were more doubtful.  I don't know how many times over the years that I heard people complain, even now, that e-books could not provide the same experience as paper books, the same texture and smell and the physical action of turning the pages, that reading electronic displays are too tiresome, etc.  Some of these criticisms were merely technological, and could be solved with innovations such as e-ink.  Others were rooted in sentimentality for superfluous features of the old medium, which those who will grow up with e-books will not share.  Do we today miss the characteristics of scrolls and hand-written parchment, or of clay tablets?  No, because most of us today have no experience with those things, and would consider it perverse to prefer them.  Likewise, our descendants will not recognize the desirability of paper books, except perhaps as antique collectibles.

I have always found paper books to be less than optimal.  They tended to be heavy, often heavier than my iPad today.  They were also bound, so that you had to prop them open, lest they close or change pages by themselves, and then you had to worry about damaging the spine.  And once they closed, you would lose your place if you did not have a bookmark.  It was cumbersome to have to flip through hundreds of pages.  E-book haters talk about snuggling in bed with paper books, but I always found them to be poor bedtime companions.  Plus, you cannot read them without a light!

So I am thrilled that the technology has finally caught up with sci-fi.  What I find irritating is that many people confuse the content with the medium.  For many, the word "book" refers strictly to bound leaves of paper.  However, there were books before it was common to write them on codices, and there will be after paper is gone.  A book is the words that are written on the paper, on digital medium, or other media such as parchment, clay or stone, and is independent of the medium, itself.  Remember, Homer did not write on paper; he could not even see!  But you can now download his works as e-books.  Books will live on, longer than paper will.

MJD 56015.026

The Short, Strange History of Decimal Time

In my previous post I linked to an article from the science and sci-fi blog, io9.  There was another post there a couple of weeks ago I wanted to link to, The Short, Strange History of Decimal Time.

MJD 55987.308

Skynet becomes self-aware today

In the first episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the terminator Cameron, played by Summer Glau, says:

The Skynet missile defense system goes online April 19, 2011, declares war on mankind, and triggers a nuclear apocalypse two days later.

The exact time is frequently given on the Internet as 20:11, or 8:11 p.m., although I don't know what time zone this is supposed to be, nor can I find the exact quote this time was taken from.  I also find it curious that the time is the same as the year, suggesting that someone may have mistaken one for the other.

If it's Eastern Time, it just now happened.  I believe that Skynet was located in Colorado, which could mean that we have two more hours.  If it's Universal Time, then it would correspond to MJD 55670.841, which was several hours ago.

In Terminator 2, and presumably in the original movie, there was a different date (50689.260):

The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Judgment Day is averted at the end of this movie, but in Terminator 3, which was released in 2003, we find that it was merely delayed until July 25, 2004 6:18 pm Eastern Time (53211.929).

The events in the 2008 TV series take place after T2 and creates an alternate timeline, having the characters travel forward in time so that John Connor, who was supposedly born in 1985, can still be a teenager in the present day.  This is how Skynet's awakening is delayed until today.  Judgment Day will now happen on Thursday. (55672)

Good luck to you all!

MJD 55671.029
[via SF Weekly]

Stardate apps for iPhone

Stardate Calculator by Priddy Software was released to the app store on August 10 (55409) and is free.  It's very basic.  Time and calendar date are displayed in a column with year, month, day, hour and minute broken out, and the stardate below, on a starry background.  Tap on the calendar date, time or stardate to change them and convert.  Both calendar date and time have a button for "today".  However, the displayed time is two hours off from the time I pick, probably because the developer is in the US Central Time Zone.  It should use either the user's local time or Greenwich (and make clear if it's the latter) rather than Illinois time.  The "i" button just brings up ads for other apps, including several fart apps, but at least there are no ads on the front page, which is good for a free app.  They should put some information about stardates, and the method they use to generate them.
The current stardate is -311636.5, which I can tell uses the same method as the "twenty-fourth century stardates" calculated by TrekGuide.com.  They start from 2322 May 25 (169296) as 0.0 and increment by 1000.0 every 365.25 days.  Since this date is in the future, contemporary stardates are negative.  Thus, this app is fine if you want to convert between stardates and calendar dates used in the 24th century, as on The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space 9 (DS9) or Voyager, (VOY) but not very satisfactory for earlier centuries, as on the original series (TOS) or right now.

I have mentioned the other two stardate apps previously on this blog.  StarDate Calculator Pro sounds like a paid version of the above app, but is actually free and made by David Frick, aka Triangle Powers Software.  It's even simpler than the above app.  It starts out with the current stardate, which is now 64214.9, even though the calendar date always shows "September 26 2009" (55100) when it first loads.  You can convert from any Gregorian calendar date to a stardate, but not vice versa.  This app does not give correct stardates for future centuries when the TV series and movies take place, but it does provide a good approximation of the stardates given in episodes of TNG/DS9/VOY according to when they first aired on television.  The app apparently uses the TrekGuide.com formula for "contemporary dates in The Next Generation Stardate format", which starts with 0.0 on 1946 July 15 and increments by 1000.0 every year.  This gives satisfactory-looking stardates for the current era, if not for future ones.

iStardate by Max Soderstrom/SusaSoftX was updated to version 1.1 on 2010 July 19 (55396) and costs 99 cents.  As before, it loads with a starry field overlaid with the current stardate, which appears right now as [-28]3770.31.  But now when you tap it, a "convert" button appears, allowing you to convert any Gregorian calendar date.  It increments automatically, like a clock, 0.01 stardates every 2 or 3 minutes, or 5.00 per day.  The "i" button gives a brief explanation, which really does not explain anything.

iStardate uses the method from Andrew Main's FAQ, which is my least favorite.  Basically, he has stardates rolling over from 9999.99 to 0000.00 every five-and-a-half years, then incrementing the "issue" number in brackets.  They start from [0]0000.0 in 2162, right after the Federation will be founded, with negative issues before that, with the current one being [-28].  According to the FAQ, after 2269 several different methods will be used, in order to correspond with the stardates used in the various TV shows and movies, but the app continues using the same formula for these periods.  So the app gives incorrect stardates in the future centuries, and ugly ones in ours.  Even though this method was also adopted by Google Calendar, I cannot stand these stardates.

You may wonder what the numbers that look like stardates are that I have after Gregorian dates.  These are Modified Julian Day numbers, which have been used by astronomers for over a half-century to date star observations, and which are a modification of the Julian Days used since the 19th century.  Just add a decimal and they become Julian Dates.

MJD 55471.063

Update: (55472.572) I forgot to include the latest version of New Clocks, which shows a current stardate similar to Triangle Power Software's app.

Update: (56144.078) Sternzeit by Sebastian Bothe uses TNG stardates with January 1, 2323, as the epoch, so that stardates for the present period are large, negative numbers, slightly different from Priddy's Stardate Calculator app.  Priddy's app is the only one that let's you enter a time when converting to stardates.  Triangle's Stardate Calculator Pro no longer seems to be available in the appstore.

Star Trek: The Exhibition

Today we went to Star Trek: The Exhibition at the Tech Museum in San Jose.   My captain is more interested in the later series, especially Voyager, while her first officer prefers the earlier shows.  We sat in the captain's chair and stood on the transporter pad while watching ourselves dissolve on the monitor.  I saw several different PADDs there, from various centuries, and noted their resemblance to the new iPad, and the smaller ones resembled the iPhone I carried with me.  The communicators reminded me of flip phones, although in function they are more like satellite phones.  And scattered around the exhibit were LARS displays, including an entire corridor, but no matter how much I tapped the screens, I got no response from the ship's computer.  Nor did the jelly beans on the TOS bridge do anything.  Oh, well.  There was also a large display of a timeline, with separate sections for each series and movie, starting the 20th century, and mentioning the return to the moon during the 21st century by the Constellation Program.  Oops!  I guess this was an alternate universe where Obama did not cancel Constellation.  I only noticed year numbers, no stardates, although I did not pay that much attention, since I'm already familiar with Star Trek chronology, and I was more interested in examining props than reading a bunch of stuff that I can get online.  I did try jumping through the Guardian of Forever to past centuries, but found only this one on the other side, and no Joan Collins.

Stardate 55275.0

Pads

I have heard people making fun of the iPad because of the similarity to a feminine hygiene product, never mind that "pad" is a generic term that has many other uses. For one thing, it's sounds the same as very similar devices on Star Trek! Only according to Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki, it's spelled PADD, which stands for Personal Access Display Device.  Most likely, this is really a backronym, just as another Apple product, the Lisa, supposedly stood for Local Integrated Software Architecture, even though Steve Jobs's daughter also happened to be named Lisa.

The name iPad may have been chosen so that all three devices have the same first two letters, iPod, iPhone and iPad.  I think that from now on I'll just call them collectively iP.

MJD 55236.476

New Stardates

I just watched the newly released DVD of the Star Trek movie, and I noticed that the stardates are different from the original series and its spin-offs. 

Decimal time in science fiction

My first encounter with decimal time was through science fiction.  Star Trek used stardates, which were originally four digit numbers plus one decimal.  In college, I learned that astronomers actually use numbers similar to that to date star observations, called Julian Dates, which use the decimal to represent the time of day.  Decimal time standards are also found in various other science fiction works, like Battlestar Galatica, Metropolis, Asimov, etc.  The Doctor does not use decimal time AFAIK, but I would not be surprised if some alien race did at some point in the lengthy history of the show.

MJD 55179.7

Doctor Who

There's not enough decimal time stuff happening to keep this blog active, so I am going to talk about other interests, one of which is science fiction.  I have discovered that BBC America is going to air new Doctor Who specials for the next three weeks.  Here are the dates and times:

• The Waters of Mars: Saturday, December 19, 9:00 pm EST/PST  (JD 2455185)
  
• The End of Time, Part One: Saturday, December 26, 9:00 pm EST/PST (JD 2455192)
  
• The End of Time, Part Two: Saturday, January 2, 8:00 pm EST/PST  (JD 2455199)
  

The two specials that aired a few months ago are being repeated this week, which means that all the episodes for the entire year will be shown in the coming month.  These are the final episodes with David Tennant playing the Doctor.  There will also be a one hour doc saluting him.

MJD 55177.7