Decimal Time

iPhone 4S

2011-10-07T05:26:00.001-07:00

I have been broadcasting live video using my iPhone 4. I've been waiting to see if the new iPhone would be worth upgrading to. Now that the iPhone 4S has been released, I can tell you that there have been specific improvements to the camera and video processing:

• 8 megapixels, up from 5
• Wider aperture
• Additional lens (5 instead of 4)
• Faster shutter
• Face detection
• Faster processor
• 1080p HD video
• Video stabilization
• Temporal noise reduction

Hopefully some of those will result in better video broadcasts, with better color, sharper images, less graininess at night, less shakiness and less problems. The download speed is potentially doubled, depending on the network, but the upload speed is unchanged, so that will be of little help.

Another benefit is the integrated Siri voice assistant, which will apparently allow me to do more hands-free while driving, such as getting addresses and directions, sending texts, etc. I'll have to wait to see it in action.

Will it be worth $200 plus $55 tax to upgrade? I guess I'll find out in a week, because I've already ordered one! My wife should be grateful to get my iPhone 4.

It's a shame that Steve Jobs had to pass the day after it came out. This is his legacy.

Bonne année!

2011-09-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

The autumnal equinox occurs on MJD 55827.378 (2011 Sept. 23 09:04 UTC) or 9h13 in the morning, Paris mean time. Therefore, according to the rule in effect during the French Revolution, MJD 55827 (23 September in the Gregorian calendar) will be the first day of year CCXX in the Republican Calendar.

According to the rule used by Brumaire, including their iPhone and iPad apps, MJD 55827 is also the first day of the 220th Republican year. The day before, MJD 55826 (22 September), is a leap day according to Brumaire, but not according to the official calendar rule. Dates prior to this are different by one day, but with the start of the new year, dates will be the same by both rules until 2014.

The first month of the Republican calendar is Vendémiaire, so New Year's Day is 1 Vendémiaire. Happy new year!

MJD 55824.627

Metric clock video

2011-09-09T00:52:00.001-07:00

I found this video by a guy who actually had a mechanical "metric clock" made for him.

Btw, I'm using the new Blogger app on my iPad to write this. Maybe now I'll post more often. But it leads me to wonder again why anybody makes iPhone apps that aren't formatted for iPads.

MJD 55658.367

Salut et Fraternité app for iPad by Brumaire

2011-08-10T14:55:00.000-07:00

Finally, people are starting to make apps formatted for iPad. Salut et Fraternité for iPad by Brumaire is a port of the Salut et Fraternité app for iPhone, which displays the current French Republican calendar date and decimal time, and allows you to convert between Republican and Gregorian dates. Unfortunately, instead of simply updating the original app for iPad, they made it a separate app, forcing you to pay $1.99 for both. The iPad version is pretty much the same as the original, but looks better on the bigger screen. Also, instead of a separate tab for the decimal time watch, you select a setting to have it displayed on the main tab. However, for some reason the season images don't appear for me on the "Convert" tab after I turn them on. If you already have the iPhone version, you might want to simply use that on your iPad, rather than pay twice, even if it does look a bit crappy, although another two bucks at least won't set you back much.

MJD 55783.913

Carrigan paper

2011-07-28T14:12:00.000-07:00

Richard Carrigan's 1978 paper in the American Scientist, "Decimal Time", is now available online at JSTOR. Unfortunately, you need an account to read the whole thing, but the first page is available for free. Here is the complete citation:

Decimal Time: Unlike the metric system of measurements, decimal time did not survive the French Revolution. But is dividing the day by tens a possibility for the future?

Richard A. Carrigan Jr.
American Scientist
Vol. 66, No. 3 (May-June 1978), pp. 305-313
(article consists of 9 pages)
Published by: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27848641

MJD 55770.882

Revol-di app for iPhone by Kodaski.fr

2011-05-29T03:47:00.000-07:00

Revol-di 1.0 by Kodaski.fr was released 2011 January 20 (55581) and is the third French Republican Calendar app for the iPhone. The name is taken from an early proposal for the first day of the décade, better known as Primidi. Unlike Calendrier and Salut et Fraternité, this one is free. Unfortunately, like the others, it is formatted only for the iPhone (and iPod Touch) and not the iPad. (It's been over a year, why doesn't everybody recognize the iPad?) Also unlike the others, it is targeted at genealogists, so it only converts dates during the revolutionary period when the calendar was in effect, 1792-1805 (JD 2375840-2380688), and does not convert more recent dates, nor does it display decimal time. At least it does not have to worry about which method to use for determining modern dates.

It does have features the others don't, however. For one, you can make notes, which are stored under the (Gregorian) date they are made. This is useful for recording birth dates and such during the Revolution. The entire notepad may then be shared via email. Under "Information", facsimiles of the laws relating to the Republican Calendar are available, in French. (Gregorian dates are also displayed in French.) "Historical context" gives information about the calendar. "The calendar months Illustrations" shows period paintings of calendar girls. There is a "Help" section and four different wallpapers to choose from.

MJD 55710.444

Nonidi 9 Prairial an CCXIX à 4^hd 50^md t.m.P.

Skynet becomes self-aware today

2011-04-19T17:41:00.000-07:00

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]

iPad apps

2011-04-07T01:49:00.000-07:00

I've been busy playing with my new iPad 2 for the past couple of weeks. When I first connected it with iTunes, it transferred over all my hundreds of iPhone apps.

I noticed right away that these fell into two categories. Some apps open in a small window, slightly larger than the iPhone screen, with a "2X" button that enlarges it to fill most, but not all, of the screen, but generally making the graphics blurry and pixelated with elements that are not formatted for that size. Other apps are formatted for the iPad and fill the whole screen. The latter are indicated by a plus sign on their purchase buttons in the app store, and are called "universal apps", meaning that they are designed to work on all iOS devices, so that they are formatted for both iPhone and iPad. I also downloaded a bunch of iPad apps, which do not run at all on iPhones, although almost all iPhone apps will run on an iPad, even if not designed for it.

It seems that there are hardly any decimal/metric time apps designed for the iPad. I could find no universal decimal time apps. However, ecce, maker of the MetricClock and MetricClockFree apps for the iPhone, also now makes iPad only versions of these apps. However, since they are separate apps, you have to pay twice to get both the iPhone and iPad versions of the paid apps, although these are only $0.99, or you can just get the free versions with ads and fewer feartures. That's a better deal than some other apps, such as SkyFire, which charges $2.99 for their iPhone app and another $4.99 if you also want it on the iPad. (I'm using the iPhone version on my iPad, which looks crappy, but I only use it to convert Flash videos.)

On Wednesday (55657) ecce updated the MetricClock for iPad Free app to version 1.4, adding the ability to use backgrounds from your camera roll, and set the clock color. When I updated to the new version, my clock disappeared, but after I deleted and downloaded it again, it worked fine.

The only other decimal time iPad app I could find is Julian Date Converter, which is the iPad version of Julian Date Calculator for iPhone. This app, which costs a dollar more at $1.99, takes advantage of the larger screen by showing twelve different decimal times at once, while the iPhone version only shows the Julian Date and one other at a time. The iPad version includes one decimal time format that the iPhone one does not, GPS Time, and also displays the sidereal time and longitude, and also has the feature to "lock to UTC", which keeps all the times synchronized with the current time, incremented once a second.

MJD 55658.367

Macrosoft Converts to Metric Time System

2011-04-07T00:24:00.000-07:00

Last week Macrosoft (not to be confused with Microsoft) issued a press release announcing that the company was converting to metric time. Of course, this was a not-very original April Fool's joke, but it may be the first with a YouTube video.

MJD 55658.308

Double Summer Time

2011-02-24T03:27:00.000-08:00

In the United Kingdom, proposals are repeatedly made to move the clocks forward. Like most northern countries, the UK currently moves their clocks one hour forward in spring and back in the autumn. From the last Sunday of October to the last Sunday of March, Britain is on Greenwich Mean Time, also known as Universal Time or Western European Time. Then from March to October, they are on British Summer Time, i.e. one hour ahead of GMT.

There are now two different proposals being discussed. One is to move the entire country one hour ahead of the current times all year, i.e. one hour ahead of GMT from October to March, and two hours ahead of GMT from March to October, which is called "double summer time". The other is to keep Scotland the same, and change the rest of the UK, i.e. England, Wales and Northern Ireland, so that the country would be divided into two time zones.

The reason to exclude Scotland from the change is that the further to the north and west you go, the later the sun comes up, so that on the shortest days it wouldn't rise until about ten o'clock, and on the longest days it would set after eleven in the evening. This is just too late for some Scots. But having two time zones would obviously put parts of the country out of kilter. One of the motivations for moving forward an hour is to be in the same time zone as most of the European Union, Central European Time. Currently in the EU, only Ireland and Portugal are also on Western European Time.

It has been tried before. During World War II, Britain was on the same system, being one hour ahead of GMT in winter, and two in summer. And for three years, from 1968 to 1971, they were on Daylight Saving Time all year, i.e. GMT+1, although without double summer time.

I have never understood the desire to tinker with time. Why not simply get up earlier in the morning? All you have to do is change work schedules. Why mess with the clocks? Just let everyone quit (and start) work an hour earlier. There are a number of arguments to advance the time, most of which seem specious to me. I wonder what the real motivations are?

MJD 55616.477

MetricClockFree iOS apps by ecce software

2011-02-16T19:00:00.000-08:00

Another post, another app. This one may look familiar, because (as the name suggests) its a free version of ecce's MetricClock app for iPhone. The differences are, first, iAds in the free version, and second, no ability to change settings, such as color, digital display, custom image background, etc., although you can still move the clock face around and resize it. It also does not display the percentage of your life span. So if you want to try before you buy, or you just don't care about any of that, you can now get this free app.

There are also iPad versions of both the paid and free apps, which I never noticed before, since I don't have one of those devices, yet. They appear to be the same as the iPhone versions, just reformatted.

MJD 55609.125

Reviews: Bluetooth headsets

2011-01-07T04:24:00.000-08:00

I am on the road a lot, and I used to listen to talk radio, such as NPR, but when I got my first iPod I started listening to podcasts, since I did not have to depend upon whatever happened to be on at a particular time, and I could pause playback. I also had a mono Bluetooth headset for talking on my "feature" phone, which I also used when I upgraded to an iPhone, a Motorola H680. Although this worked fine for talking on the phone, I still had to switch to the earphones on a cord to listen to podcasts, with one in my ear and the other dangling so I don't get a ticket. (For music, I just listen to the radio through car speakers.) The problem with this is getting tangled in the cord and seatbelt, especially while the phone is plugged into the charger, as well as smashing it in the door, etc. I have ruined several iPod headphones that way.

After a few months, I found the Bluetooth Mono for iPhone jailbreak tweak, which solved the problem beautifully. However, it required that I had to keep jailbreaking my iPhone every time Apple updated the firmware, which means waiting weeks or months for a new jailbreak before updating, or going without, which I was forced to do for a couple of months when I got a new iPhone. The current jailbreak method is still "tethered", meaning that it will break if I reboot, although that has not been a problem. Jailbreaking also offers a lot of other great stuff, but everything else I really wanted is now available without jailbreaking. Except playing music and podcasts through a mono Bluetooth headset.

But there are alternatives. iPhones now support the A2DP stereo Bluetooth profile, and there are mono headsets which will support A2DP. After hearing several recommendations, I got the Aliph Jawbone ICON. It sells for $99.95 at the Apple Store, but Best Buy had it on sale for $20 off. The same day I got the Jawbone, my wife bought a Plantronics BackBeat 903+ Bluetooth stereo headset from the Apple Store for $99.95. She already had a Motorola MOTOROKR S9-HD.

So now I have four Bluetooth headsets available to me, and I can make some comparisons.

My new Jawbone is beautiful. I got "The Bombshell", which has an irregular gold outer surface. It fits comfortably in my ear with the largest "ergo" earbud, and doesn't require an ear loop to stay in, although it does come with one. I had to connect it to my PC via USB and update it in order to activate A2DP stereo, but then it worked fine. You can also change the voice or language it uses to talk to you, which I couldn't care less about. The USB connector also means that I don't have to buy another car charger, which is a bonus. It is rated for only 4.5 hours of talk time, which is a lot less than the 8 hours my old Motorola lasts. At least there is a visible power indicator on the iPhone status bar, and pushing the single button gives me an audible estimate of the talk time remaining, while the Motorola simply starts beeping shortly before it dies. I have not yet had a chance to see how the Jawbone works out during extended use. [Update 55572.531: Now I have, and it lasts just as long, if not longer, and recharges quickly.]

The main drawback is that, like the Motorola, it lacks stereo controls, especially pause and play. I can pause playback on both headsets by simply switching them off, which at least is safer than fiddling with the touchscreen while driving, but I have to stop the car to safely unlock the iPhone screen, open the iPod app (if necessary) and tap the triangle to resume playing. This is slightly more awkward with the Jawbone, since the on/off switch is on the side that touches my face. [Update 55572.531: I meant to rant about the bug that prevents voice commands from working with podcasts, but I just figured out that if I load just one song, that fixes the problem, so I can say "pause" and "play" to control playback, although there is a significant delay, and sometimes it will dial a random number from my contacts instead of what I tell it. I also found that using the dash mount I got today makes it easier to use the touchscreen.]

Both headsets have a lower volume than the wired headphones, which makes it difficult to hear podcasts in a noisy environment, such as a moving car in traffic with passengers. The sound on the Jawbone seems to be richer than on the Motorola, although it's hard to tell for sure. The ICON also seemed to have better noise reduction, which is supposed to work by having a sensor in contact with your cheek.

But then my wife had to go and buy the Plantronics BackBeat 903+! This stereo headset goes in both ears and includes separate buttons for phone, volume up and down, and pause/play. It also has impressive volume, and is rated for 7 hours of listen time. She was unsatisfied with the Motorola MOTOROKR because all the electronics are in a band that goes behind the neck, making it uncomfortable to lie down with it; plus, she keeps losing ear-buds, and complains that it's not loud enough. The Backbeat has the electronics behind each hear, with a thin, flexible cord connecting them, which is quite comfortable to lie on. And it means that you can pop it out of one ear, and have it dangle from the other, making it safe and legal to drive with! It turns out that her stereo headset may actually be a better solution than any mono one.

I will continue using the Jawbone ICON for now, but I may end up borrowing my wife's BackBeat, at least when she's not using it.

MJD 55568.517

Smartphone app roundup

2010-12-20T04:19:00.000-08:00

Several different things have come my way at the exact same time that are sorta like decimal time apps, but not exactly.

Decimal Time 1.0 by Harald Mueller is a 99¢ iPhone app which does not display decimal time. Rather, it represents standard 24-hour time as four columns, one for each digit. Each column has a number of binary indicators that indicate the digit, depending on the maximum number. For instance, the first column has two indicators, representing 2×10, and the second column has nine, so that the hours 0-23 can be indicated. The next two columns are for the minutes, so one column has five and the last has nine, for minutes 0-59. Get it? If you are looking for a real decimal time app, don't get this one!

At the same time, I saw this tweet by Oliver Bothwell directing me not to an app in the iTunes app store, but to a "Metric Time" web app, which is basically a web page that works on iOS devices. He says it's optimized for iPad, but it works on my iPhone. I find that it does not work on all Windows or Linux browsers, but it does work on Safari and Chrome. What is much more interesting is his Metric Diary, which not only uses decimal time, but also a decimal, or "metric", calendar, with ten-day weeks and ten months per year alternating between 35 and 40 days. This is all explained on his metric poster.

The final entry is the Metric Clock Widget for Android by Dan Perron. I'm not able to check it out, but it's one I'd like to have. There are few widgets for iPhone, and those are only if you jailbreak.

MJD 55550.513

Happy Holidays!

2010-11-23T04:49:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is almost here in the US, and this year falls on the 25th of November (55525), exactly one month before Christmas (55555). I was thinking about this a couple of nights ago, and was wondering when Hanukkah was this year, when I noticed that there was a full moon in the sky above me. I remembered Jon Stewart singing on A Colbert Christmas a couple of years ago (54793) that the Festival of Lights also starts "On the 25th." ("Of December?" "Kislev." "Which is when, exactly?" "I will check.") Since the full moon falls on the 15th day of Jewish months, that means that the holiday must follow in ten days, which would be the night of 1 December (55531/2). We don't really celebrate, since there are no kids left, but I'll probably bring home some gelt. That's all three holidays falling on the 25th of some month.

I just noticed while writing this that Christmas falls on Modified Julian Day 55555, which is another reason to celebrate, I guess.

I think it's funny that some people get upset if they hear "Happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas", because Christmas is not the only holiday. We have not only Christmas, Thanksgiving and Hanukkah, but also New Year, which most people celebrate regardless of their religion. I suppose somebody must celebrate Kwanzaa, too. ("What would it be like without Kwanzaa? Like every year before 1966.") If we were to be really accurate, we should mention all of them, but that would take forever, so why not just lump them under "holidays"? It's not meant necessarily to avoid offending non-Christians, and I don't why people want to do that, but it's to include the other holidays we all celebrate in this country, i.e. Thanksgiving early in the season, and the New Year later.

Happy holidays!

MJD 55523.534

Decimal Clock app for iPhone by Michael Behan

2010-11-10T02:59:00.000-08:00

Decimal Clock is a simple app which displays an analog decimal clock, with the decimal time in digital underneath, on a green background with diagonal stripes. There are no other options or features. There is a 10 at the top of the clock, as with French clocks, but the digital display starts at 00.00.00, except a brief moment when it says 10.00.00. The app costs $0.99.

There's an ad that's one of those autogenerated videos like that GEICO commercial at www.headoverflow.com.

MJD 55510.453

Getting better

2010-11-10T02:34:00.000-08:00

I've been using the Skyfire app for a few days now, and it seems to be working normally. It is still not ideal. The app is blocked on some sites, like Hulu and Fox, although I don't know why you would be able to watch Family Guy episodes on a computer but not on other devices. Some videos just don't load for some reason. However, the most annoying thing is pages that have multiple videos, like on io9, where Skyfire only plays the first video. It also don't work with Flash games and other animation, but fortunately Frash will work with some of them, if you're jailbroken. So still not perfect, but better than before.

MJD 55510.440

Still no Flash for iPhone

2010-11-03T18:12:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest drawbacks with the iPhone has always been its lack of ability to run Flash. Flash is used to embed animation and video into web sites, and many sites use it, which means that a lot of web content is not available on iOS devices. Apple refuses to support Flash because it uses a lot of resources and degrades performance. This is true; I often have difficulty playing Flash videos on my old laptop. Apple has been promoting HTML5 for playing videos, and many sites now support this, but many still do not. I am frequently frustrated by this.

Two months ago (55440.685) Skyfire announced that they had submitted an app to the iTunes App Store which would allow viewing of Flash video on web pages. The way it works is that they convert the Flash on their own servers and send it back to your device. That way, you don't have to run Flash on your iPhone, but you still get the videos. I have been eagerly waiting for the past two months for this app to get approved. Skyfire is already one of the most popular apps on Android and other phones. Apparently iPhones are not the only phones that have trouble with Flash.

Well, today (55503) it happened. I bought the app for $2.99 and started browsing. First I tried one of their suggested sites, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart (even though I already watch it everyday on TV). It wouldn't load. Then I started browsing my news feeds, and quickly found a BBC story that had a Flash video. It took forever to load, then I got a few seconds of an advert and it stopped. Other attempts were also unsuccessful. I began to suspect what the cause of the problem might be, as it happens frequently when highly desirable sites turn on or get publicized. The servers are overloaded.

Turns out, I was exactly right. Skyfire has removed their app from the App Store. They state that within five hours the app had become the top grossing iPhone app and that demand far exceeded their predictions. So now we have to wait for them to increase their capacity, which will probably take a while. At least this time I managed to grab the app before it was pulled. Usually by the time I learn about an app too good to be true, Apple has already pulled it, like when that kid snuck in free tethering in his app. Hopefully as the early adopters finish playing with their new toy, the servers will start running again, in which case I am ready.

MJD 55504.050

10/10/10

2010-10-08T12:33:00.000-07:00

Since this site is named Decimal Time, I should mention the fact that 2010 October 10 (55479), or 10/10/10, is the tenth annual Powers of Ten Day, which is named after the 1968 short film that starts by looking at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a power of ten every ten seconds until reaching 100 million light years, then zooming down to 0.000001 ångstroms. This is not to be confused with Decimal Day, which was when the UK converted to decimal currency on 15 February 1971 (40997).

Also, the new jailbreak for iOS 4.1 (iPhone/iPad Touch/iPad/Apple TV) is scheduled for 10/10/10 at 10:10:10, presumably GMT (55479.423727). Unfortunately, it only works on the latest versions of these devices, but that's OK for me. Update: (55479.189) a different jailbreak has already been released, so the all-tens release probably won't happen now.

MJD 55477.815

Stardate apps for iPhone

2010-10-01T18:32:00.000-07:00

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.

New planets

2010-09-30T02:10:00.000-07:00

Today (55468) two more planets were announced orbiting the star Gliese 581, one of which is only three times as heavy as earth and orbiting in the "Goldilocks zone" where liquid water, and therefore life as we know it, can exist. In fact, one astronomer believes that "chances of life on this planet are 100 percent."

This seems like a ridiculous thing to say, since we only have one data point so far, which is not enough to determine probabilities. Just because life might be possible does not make it certain, and there are still too many variables which we do not know.

The planet is the sixth to be discovered around this red dwarf star, which is about 20 light-years (190 terameters) away from us, and called Gliese 581g. This is what bugs me. The six planets are lettered b-g, and the parent star is letter a. This is how astronomers name extrasolar planets. The first object in another system is named a, which is always a star, the second object, which may or may not also be a star, is lettered b, and so on.

But it's not supposed to be that way! Any sci-fi fan knows that planets are numbered in order from the parent star, which always has a pronounceable name. For instance, earth, the third planet from the sun, is Sol III. Khan was marooned on the fifth planet of a star, Ceti Alpha V, shortly before the sixth planet, Ceti Alpha VI, was destroyed. It's not that bad that they use letters instead of numbers, but the letters do not distinguish between stars and planets, and go in order of discovery, which usually relates to size, rather than distance. How stars, themselves, are named is much more complicated, and more often have just letters and numbers than proper names.

Of course, it has to be that way. There are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, only a few thousand of which are visible to the naked eye from earth. Only the brightest of these have short names. Up to a couple of dozen per constellation have a name that is a Greek letter combined with the name of the constellation, like Alpha Centauri, which is actually a binary star, the components being lettered A and B. (Proxima Centauri, the closest star to us, may or may not be part of the same system, so it is sometimes called Alpha Centauri C.) There are various other naming schemes, some based upon star catalogues such as the Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars, which lists nearly a thousand stars that are within 20 parsecs (617 petameters). Stars often have multiple names, e.g. Alpha Centauri is also called Rigil Kent or Toliman, as well as various other designations.

It is currently impossible to name extrasolar planets based upon orbital order, since we cannot see all of the ones that might be orbiting a given star. So the best we can do is to name them as we find them, which necessarily means that they are named in order of discovery. In our own solar system, we have proper names for all the planets. The six innermost have been known since prehistory, long before it was known what they actually were, so there is no order of discovery, although we could order them by apparent brightness. If we make the sun Sol a, then earth could be Sol b, Venus Sol c, Jupiter Sol d, Mars Sol e, Saturn Sol f, and Mercury, which is hard to see even at its brightest, Sol g.

One advantage of this system is that discovering a new planet would not require renaming known planets. If a planet was discovered between Sol IV (Mars) and Sol V (Jupiter), then it would become Sol V and Jupiter would become Sol VI. This actually happened a couple of hundred years ago, when Ceres was discovered, although now Ceres is classified as an asteroid or dwarf planet. The first planet discovered in modern times, Uranus, would be Sol h, and Ceres would be Sol i. But due to our vantage in the inner solar system, the last major planet, Neptune, was discovered after several minor planets, which were later reclassified as asteroids. We all know that Pluto was likewise demoted from major planet to dwarf planet. As we find more and more planets, such distinctions will become even more arbitrary, but they will tend to be discovered in order of size and named in that order, rendering it moot.

Of course, nothing precludes us from switching to the other system once we discover warp drive. If we were to colonize extrasolar planets, we would find proper names for them and their parent stars, and at the same time we could refer to their orbital number, just as we call earth Sol III. We use what is convenient for now, but in the future something else may be more convenient.

Stardate 55469.378

Starfleet HQ

Sol III

Sector 001

Alpha Quadrant

Bonne année !

2010-09-22T16:32:00.000-07:00

If you use use the Salut et Fraternité iOS app or have the "Romme" option set in the Calendrier app, or simply follow the French Republican Calendar using Romme's proposed reform, then you can celebrate today, 22 September 2010 (55461), as the first day of the new year, CCXIX (219). According to Romme's proposal, a leap day is added to the end of years divisible by four. Brumaire, maker of S&F, adds the leap day to the end of the previous year. Since 219 is neither one of these, there is no leap day, and therefore today is a new year.

However, if you use the original rule, which was the only one ever legally in effect, the new year starts at midnight on the day when the autumnal equinox occurs in Paris. The equinox occurs tonight at 20:09 my time, which is 03:09 GMT (55462.13111). France is currently two hours ahead of GMT, so that would be 5 h 9 in Paris, but actually the law specifies temps vrai de Paris (Paris apparent time), which today is about 16 or 17 minutes ahead of Greenwich, so the equinox is around 23 sept. 2010 à 3 h 25 t.v.P., or 142 decimal minutes past local apparent midnight.

Anyway, that means that tomorrow, 23 September (55462), is without doubt the first day of the new year, which means that today is a leap day, the sixth (sextile) complementary day, the Day of Revolution.

It is already tomorrow (summer time) in the eastern hemisphere, so whichever day you celebrate, bonne année !

MJD 55461.979
Sextidi 6 complémentaire an CCXVIII à 9^hd 86^md t.m.P. au
Primidi 1^er Vendémiaire an CCXIX à 9^hd 86^md t.m.P.

Julian Date Calculator app for iOS by CosmoWerx

2010-09-18T03:17:00.000-07:00

Julian Date Calculator is an iPhone app by CosmoWerx, aka Milan Battelino. Currently at version 1.3, it costs 99 cents in the App Store. As the name indicates, this app calculates Julian Dates, which count the days since the beginning of the Julian Period, 4713 BCE, including the decimal time from noon UTC (GMT). To convert any (Coordinated) Universal Time and calendar date to a Julian Date, first enter the time on the picker and tap the date to change it, or vice versa. You may also tap the "UTC Now!" button to get the current UTC time and Julian Date, which generates a loud "ping!" sound.. However, you have to convert between local and UTC time yourself.

To convert a Julian Date to a calendar date and UTC time, simply tap on the Julian Date and a number pad will pop up, allowing you to edit the field, then tap the "Done" button to convert. You can also select and copy the Julian Date to paste into another app.

There is a second field under the Julian Date, which displays an additional decimal date, which you can select by clicking on the "i". Additional date options available include:

Modified Julian Date
Reduced Julian Date
Truncated Julian Date (NASA)
Truncated Julian Date (NIST)
Dublin Julian Date
ANSI Date
Rata Die
Unix Time
RAMSES Time

Selecting any of these will display a description of what they are. The last two are second counts, rather than day counts. RAMSES Time is new to me, and is explained as the number of seconds since the beginning of 2000, MJD 51544.0, developed by the Swedish Space Corporation.

There is also an iPad version, named Julian Date Converter, for $1.99, which shows all the decimal dates and times at once, including GPS Time.

MJD 55457.419

JD 2455457.919

RAMSES 338119402

Holidays part deux

2010-09-16T04:42:00.000-07:00

The moon is half full in the evening sky, setting around midnight, which means that it's been about a week since the lunar holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Eid. (The origin of the seven-day week may be related to the four phases of the moon.) Soon there will be more holidays. The tenth day of the Jewish month Tishri is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which begins at sundown on Friday, 17 September (55456/7). Last year, Stephen Colbert played my wife calling his "Atone Phone" on his show. Shame on you, Stephen, shame on you!

17 September is also the first Complementary Day of the French Republican Calendar. Since each Republican month had thirty days, and there are 365 and a fraction days in an average year, there are five or six days left over, which were called Complementary Days, or Sancolotides. Here are the names of the Complementary Days this year:

17 Sept.: Virtu (virtue)
18 Sept.: Génie (skill)
19 Sept.: Travail (work)
20 Sept.: l'Opinion (opinion)
21 Sept.: Récompenses (awards)
22 Sept.: Révolution (revolution)

Note that the sixth (sextile) day is a leap day, which occurs because there are 366 days in between this year's and last year's equinoxes. Those who use a fixed rule to determine leap years do not recognize that there is a leap day this year, and observe Wednesday, 22 September, as the first day of the year CCXIX (219) and of the month of Vendémiaire. Those who follow the original rule of equinoxes observe the new year on Thursday, 23 September, since the equinox occurs 3.435 hours, or 1.43 decimal hours, after apparent midnight in Paris on this day.

There should be a beautiful full moon this new year!

MJD 55455.479

Decadi 30 Fructidor an CCXVIII à 4^hd 85^md t.m.P.

Day of Reason

2010-09-09T03:31:00.000-07:00

I was looking for information about la fête de la raison, the Day of Reason, or Festival of Reason, which Wikipedia says was another name for one of the complementary days, or Sansculotides, in the French Republican Calendar, Opinion Day, which falls on 20 September (MJD 55459) this year. However, I cannot find an original source for this, and the Wikipedia article on the Cult of Reason and other sources state that it was instead held once, on 20 Brumaire, Year II (10 November 1793, JD 2376253/4), and the organizers were guillotined a few months later.

There is also a US National Day of Reason on the first Thursday of May, which is unrelated, but really cool.

BTW, shana tova 5771 and Eid Saeed!

MJD 55448.436
Tridi 23 Fructidor an CCXVIII à 4^hd 42^md t.m.P.
1 Tishrei 5771
30 Ramadan 1431

Holidays in other calendars this month

2010-09-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

There will be a lunar conjunction on 8 September 2010 (MJD 55447.4375), which means that the moon will pass between the earth and the sun, which happens about once a month. This is also known as an astronomical new moon, although traditionally a new moon is usually observed about a day later, when the crescent moon first becomes visible in the evening sky. In lunar calendars, this crescent moon marks the beginning of a new month.

One such calendar is the Hebrew or Jewish calendar. Sunset on 8 September will mark the beginning of the month of Tishrei and Jewish year 5771, and the holy day of Rosh Hashanah. Although the Jewish calendar has months based upon the phases of the moon, it keeps track of the seasons by sometimes adding a thirteenth month to the year, since the solar year is about eleven or twelve days longer than twelve months.

Another lunar calendar is the Muslim calendar. The crescent new moon marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan, and the feast of Eid ul-Fitr. The Muslim calendar is not predetermined, but based rather upon actual observations of the moon, so that while it is expected to occur around 10 September, it may be a day or two before or after, and varies from place to place, depending upon local observers. Unlike the Jewish calendar, the Muslim calendar does not keep track of the seasons and always has exactly twelve months in a year, so Ramadan comes about eleven days earlier every Gregorian year.

In the solar Gregorian calendar, September is the month containing the equinox marking the beginning of autumn in the northern hemisphere. This year, the equinox occurs on 23 September in the eastern hemisphere, and 22 September in the western. (MJD 55462.13111)

The French Republican calendar, used during the French Revolution, begins each year on the day this equinox occurs in Paris, which is in the eastern hemisphere, so by this rule Republican year CCXIX begins on 23 September, which means that a leap day must be added to the end of the current year CCXVIII.

However, the calendar has not been in official use since 1805, and some people use different leap year methods to determine the beginning of the calendar year. Brumaire uses a rule similar to the Gregorian calendar, but since historically the years III, VII and XI were leap years, the leap day is usually inserted at the end of the year previous to one divisible by four. That means that there is none this year (218), and in the Salute et Fraternité app the year CCXIX begins on 22 September 2010 instead of 23 September.

The Calendrier app offers a choice of two different rules, either the original equinoctial rule which starts the year on 23 September, or the Gregorian-style rule proposed by Gilbert Romme during the Revolution, which starts the year on 22 September.

MJD 55443.893
Octidi 18 Fructidor an CCXVIII à 9^hd t.m.P.

Dezimal zeit uhr

2010-08-11T15:32:00.000-07:00

Click to enlarge

That's a decimal time watch made by Rainer Nienaber of Bünde, Germany, who produces unusual hand-made watches and clocks. As with French decimal clocks, hours are marked 1 to 10 on the inner circle, minutes up to 100 on the outer circle. Nienaber's web page says "1 day = 10 hours" but this picture taken at a show earlier this year in Basel says "1 tag = 2 x 10 Stunden". If you're looking for a decimal watch that's not made by Swatch, this is it, although it will probably set you back a few thousand more!

MJD 55419.939

Android Decimal Time app

2010-08-05T03:07:00.000-07:00

This blog is not just about iPhones! Jon tweeted about an app on Android, so I asked him for a review, which you can read below.

Hi John,

Thanks for messaging me to ask for a review of the only Decimal Time app for Android.

As you can see from the screenshot (from my HTC Tattoo running Android 1.6 - attached) it's a *very* simple app showing solely the 24h time and the decimal time equivalent.

Like several of the apps you've mentioned for iOS it does suffer from the skipped dsecond issue every now and again.

There are no settings, nada!

The android market is improving and increasing rapidly and I hope there will be more Decimal Time apps in future.

Marketplace link (for android devices) market://search?q=pname:com.fxndev.decimaltime

URL for a marketplace listing. http://androidapplications.com/43094-decimal-time

Also attached is a QR code link that will take an android device straight to the marketplace download link.

Thanks

Jon @wolfpupjon on twitter

(Sent: MJD 55412.663125)

@beat app for iOS by Christophe Dirac

2010-07-25T15:04:00.000-07:00

There is a new free app displaying Swatch .beats/Internet Time. @beat by Christophe Dirac displays local 24-hour time and date along with the current beats and tenths (decibeats). It also shows a slide show of the first 50 images in your camera roll and works in landscape mode. There are no options. Tapping the "i" brings up a tribute to Internet Time inventor, Nicolas Hayek, who recently passed away, and a very brief history of Internet Time, although no description is given for what .beats actually are.

The app store search function does not recognize non-alphanumeric characters, so try searching for a combination of "beat" and the author's name.

MJD 55402.920

@961

Update (MJD 55418.253): I noticed that the photo linked here has changed, which is because the app has been updated. Although not yet published in the app store, there are some new features, such as local temperature and humidity, day of week, choice of background colors and text-to-speech. See the author's site for complete details.

Bumpers

2010-07-17T01:34:00.000-07:00

As I suspected, Steve Jobs today, just 20 miles from here, offered free "bumpers" to all iPhone 4 owners, or a choice of cases to be named later. I had planned to buy a case the first day, but Apple had none, and Best Buy was sold out. Apparently this was because Apple didn't trust case makers to keep the phone a secret, so they didn't have time to manufacture enough of them. I've been thinking that maybe I would not bother. After all, the aluminized glass is pretty tough. However, I can't keep from holding the magic spot. I've also noticed that the glass back is so smooth that it slides off other smooth surfaces. So I will gladly accept the free case, thank you.

MJD 55394.357

Death Grip

2010-07-15T23:02:00.000-07:00

I bought a new iPhone 4 a décade ago (55382), mainly because I promised my wife my 3GS when the new phone came out. There were already reports in the media about the apparent reception problem, aka "the death grip". I dismissed this initially as being over-hyped. I have been thinking that, yes, it may be a real, albeit minor, issue, but Apples reactions have made it seem even worse.

Now I no longer think it is a minor issue. Holding the phone in the most natural way, my calls do not go through, or are dropped after I make them, and my 3G data connection immediately goes south. It's quickly resolved by changing my grip, but it has become annoying, and I should not have to constantly have the problem! I do not have a case because all they had were those stupid "bumpers", and I'll be damned if I'm paying $30 plus tax (@9.5%) for a rubber band that does not even protect one of the two glass sides. To add insult to injury, Apple released a software update today, which does nothing to actually fix the problem; it just makes the bars higher and more accurate. WTF?

Tomorrow (55393.75) Apple is supposed to announce their fix. It had better be good. Free bumpers would be a start.

MJD 55393.250

New Clocks iOS app by Dennerlein Consulting

2010-07-14T20:01:00.000-07:00

The decimal time apps just keep coming. New Clocks (opens iTunes) by Jesse Dennerlein was released on July 8 (55385) and is free, supported by iAd. If you haven't seen an iAd, yet, you can download this app and tap the bottom to watch the animated, interactive ad for the ~~Toyota~~ Nissan LEAF electric car. The app, itself, simply displays ~~four~~ five different digital clocks simultaneously:

Standard time (24x60x60 per day)
Swatch Internet Time (1000x100 per day)
New Earth Time (360x60x60 per day)
Decimal time (10x100x100 per day)
Stardate (00002.728 per day)

The standard and decimal clocks display hours, minutes and seconds, the NET clock displays degrees, minutes and seconds but only increments every 15 seconds (which is one second of standard time), and the Swatch clock displays .beats and centibeats. If you tap one of the times, it will show you a brief explanation and a "More info" button that links to Wikipedia. You can change the background color for the app, and the font for each clock can be set independently.

The only bug I've found is that the Swatch and decimal time clocks sometimes skip a second/centibeat, an issue we've seen in other apps.

MJD 55392.126

Update: (55392.366) I just noticed that the Swatch .beats show local time, rather than "Biel Mean Time" (actually CEWT/BST or GMT+1). As you can see from the screenshot, the Swatch .beats (@429.89) are the same as the decimal time (4:29.89), which is pretty redundant.

Update: (55418.260) The app has been updated to fix the problem with the .beats I noted in my previous update, so they are now on BMT. Also, another clock has been added which displays stardates, according to the method used by TrekGuide.com, which basically increments 1000.000 units per year, or about 2.74 per day.

Salut et Fraternité app for iPhone by Brumaire

2010-06-26T04:56:00.000-07:00

Another decimal time app for ~~iOS~~ iPhone. Salut et Fraternité (opens iTunes) is very similar to Calendrier, as it shows the Republican calendar date and decimal time below art from the French Revolution, namely a famous depiction of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It also allows conversion both to and from Republican calendar dates, while Calendrier only converts from Gregorian to Republican. It also displays the decimal time on a simulated antique watch with animated hands.

Although similar to Calendrier, Brumaire has offered versions of their Salut et Fraternité software for years. Like the other versions, the app calculates dates by inserting a leap day before every year divisible by four (except century years). This makes it continuous with historical dates from the First Republic, when each year started on the autumnal equinox, resulting in leap days at the end of years 3, 7 and 11. Calendrier gives two different options, either to have current years begin on the equinox, or Romme's proposal to insert a leap day at the end of every year divisible by four, although the implementation of this is buggy. It just happens that dates for this year (ER 218) are the same for all three methods.

[Salut et Fraternité is $1.99]

MJD 55373.487

Octidi 8 Messidor an CCXVIII à 4^hd 94^md t.m.P.

Update: (55441.294, Sextidi 16 Fructidor an CCXVIII à 3^hd t.m.P.) Version 1.1 has dropped in the App Store, featuring calendar girl images for each month from the Revolution, optional seasonal images on the Convert and Genealogy tabs, and an option for Arabic instead of Roman numerals. Also, swiping on the settings tab brings up bios for calendar creators Gilbert Romme and Fabre d'Eglantine and a gallery of calendar girls, with text of the associated poems in French. Complementary days, which are in a couple of weeks/décades, still show the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

iOS4

2010-06-26T03:57:00.000-07:00

I upgraded my iPhone 3GS to iOS4 on Monday, and have been been offline all week. It may be my own fault for not restoring on 3.1.3 before updating to 4.0, since I jailbroke my phone. All seemed to be fine, until I left home. It turned out that my data link was broken, so while it worked fine at home on my wi-fi, it did not work on 3G or 2G/Edge. Restoring did not help. I got an appointment on Wednesday at the Apple Store Genius Bar, where they reset it to its factory state. But when I restored again, I had the same problem. So I have been manually reloading all my apps, settings, etc. It's just as well, since it will soon be my wife's phone. As soon as I get the new iPhone 4, I will likely have to reload everything all over again.

One nice thing about the new iOS is folders. I can now put all the decimal time apps in one place. This works even better than the jailbreak Categories. Other things I can do are wallpapers, multitasking, pull-up rotation-lock and iPod controls, editable playlists, improved email, spellcheck, etc. That's most of what I liked from jailbreaking, although multitasking is not as good as Backgrounder, and I cannot use my mono Bluetooth with iPod to listen to podcasts, so I will eventually jailbreak again just for that.

MJD 55373.456

iOS4

2010-06-09T16:21:00.000-07:00

There's a new catchall term for what has heretofore been called the iPhone OS, which is also used on the iPod Touch and iPad: iOS. So from now on I will call these simply iOS devices. This comes with the announcement of the new iPhone 4, which will run iOS 4.0. I might get the iPhone 4, since my wife has been bugging me for one, so she'll either get my old phone or we might even share an iPad. The flash and sharper display are nice (especially when the Netflix app is released) as would be the front-facing camera if I had anybody to use it with who also has an iPhone 4, but the iPad's large display would be a lot better to use at home, even though it costs at least $300 more.

Either way, I look forward to using iOS 4.0 on my current iPhone 3GS when it becomes available on July 21 (55351). It has a couple of useful features, including multitasking and folders. I really need these, and had to "jailbreak" my iPhone to get them before. However, there are other things I'll probably still need to jailbreak my iPhone for, such as listening to podcasts through my mono Bluetooth.

Of course, there are some other great phones available now, but I've become accustomed to my iPhone, and so far as I know there aren't very many decimal time apps, although I have heard that there is one for Android. I'm not an Apple fanboy, and I've never had bought an Apple product before my current iPhone, but I do love the iOS platform.

MJD 55356.973

dTime app by Cyberlab

2010-06-03T03:10:00.000-07:00

Yet another decimal time app has appeared in the iTunes app store, dTime by Cyberlab, (opens iTunes) currently for free. This one displays a simple analog clock dial with 100 marks around the edge, with the corresponding digital time displayed below.

The digital time is divided into three fields, each field having two digits. The first unit is called "kar" (I don't know why) which is equal to one centiday or 14.4 minutes. The next unit is called "mnit" and is equal to 100 microdays or 8.64 seconds. The third unit is unnamed and is equal to one microday or 86.4 milliseconds.

The analog dial has three hands. The "kar" hand makes a complete rotation once per day, just like a French revolutionary clock, but it points straight down at midnight (00) represented by a black circle, and straight up at midday (50) represented by a white circle. The "mnit" hand makes one rotation every "kar", which makes it ten times faster than the minute hand of a revolutionary clock, and again points down for 00 and up for 50. Then there is a little hand offset from the others, which makes a rotation once every "mnit", although this hand points up when the units are 00 and down for 50.

The Cyberlab web site has a Belgian domain and is in French, which is ironic since the authors seem unaware of French decimal time, and have reinvented the wheel. C'est la vie!

MJD 55350.423

I'm a Neanderthal

2010-05-12T16:49:00.000-07:00

Ja, Ich bin ein Neandertaler. And so might you be, if you are not from Africa. Two papers published in Science indicate that 1-4% of the genomes of Eurasians and Pacific Islanders contain DNA from Neanderthals, which Africans don't have. See John Hawks and Carl Zimmer. This suggests that shortly after human beings left Africa, about 50,000 years ago, they interbred with Neanderthals, who were then living in the Middle East, before spreading to the rest of the world. Specifically, they compared the genomes of people from France, China, New Guinea and Africa (Yoruba and San) with the genomes from the bones of several Neanderthals. Presumably, that suggests that all human beings living outside of Africa might have Neanderthal genes. Even if you're African American, you probably have Neanderthal DNA, since most blacks in America have some mixed ancestry, and even some Africans must also have Neanderthal genes, since there has always been some migration in and out of Africa. There's a caveat that it's still early days, and these are small sample sizes, and there are other possible explanations of the data, so the picture will become more refined in the future, but for now it looks pretty likely that most people outside Africa may be hybrids. It's also possible that we have genes from others, like Homo erectus; we're still finding more hominids.

Now I'm feeling offended by those GEICO commercials!

MJD 55328.992

UPDATE: I just got the free MEanderthal iPhone app from the Smithsonion, so I'm adding this image of myself from the app, since it fits so perfectly with the title.

Deci Clock and Internet Beat apps

2010-05-04T03:35:00.000-07:00

There is yet another decimal time app for the iPhone, and an update of a previously reviewed app, both of which display Swatch Internet Time .beats.

Deci Clock was released for free on 2010 April 30 (MJD 55316) by Daniel Stone @ Von Nostrum Games. The app actually displays Swatch Internet Time .beats counting from zero at 23:00 UTC, although nowhere do they say so or give any explanation of the time zone, except for a pop-up when you start the app that says:

Deci Clock

There is no escape the inevitability
of the truth. Welcome to the
decimalization of time...
We have all been calibrated to
Central European Time - GMT +1.
One World, One Time.

The time is displayed in white LED font with the .beats/millidays/decimal minutes to two decimal places (centibeats/decimal seconds) on an artistic sci-fi background, in portrait mode only, and without the @ sign. The app includes the following features:

Skins Six different sci-fi backgrounds can be selected.
Time Zones This is identical to the World Clock feature in the iPhone's built-in clock app, displaying non-decimal 12-hour clocks for different world cities.
Timer The same as the built-in clock app, but you can select 1-999 .beats to count down instead of hours and minutes.
Stopwatch Same as built-in clock app, but counts .beats and centibeats.

Internet Beat (opens iTunes) by Thomas Cherry was updated to version 1.1 on 2010 May 2 (MJD 55318). This fixes the bug I reported earlier that caused the display to be a half a .beat fast in portrait mode. Apparently, there was also some bug that only appeared in the Eastern Hemisphere, which has also been fixed. It's still a free app, and it seems that the other Swatch .beat app that was not free is no longer available.

MJD 55320.441

3D TV

2010-04-09T21:12:00.000-07:00

Today I watched coverage of the Masters Golf Tournament in 3D. Comcast is offering two hours of 3D TV per day from 7-11 April. (55293-55297) It's on channel 897 where I live.

Although they state that you need a 3D TV and 3D glasses, on a 2D TV it appears as a pair of stereo pictures side-by-side. This means that you can see the image in 3D without special equipment simply by staring at the screen and relaxing your eyes, kind of like those trippy 3D posters back in the 90s. It takes a bit of practice, but I've viewed plenty of stereo images before. Of course, without the proper equipment the effect is less than optimal; what you see is three pictures, the middle one being the 3D image, which are squished half-width, so everything looks skinny even on a wide screen, and it's difficult to keep your eyes in an unnatural position, so they keep snapping back to normal. Another problem is that it's golf, and I don't like golf, so it was difficult for me to maintain interest, and that also meant that most of the shots were long-distance, so most of the time it was hard to notice much depth.

It should actually be possible to make glasses that make it easier to view stereo images. They just need to be angled slightly to bring the images together without straining your eyes, and also spread out the image horizontally so it's not squished. They would be more expensive than paper anaglyph glasses, because they would required actual lenses instead of plastic films, but it would be a lot cheaper than buying a new TV, especially at current prices.

Still, it's something that I thought I'd never see, 3D on TV. Oh, sure, I've watched 3D before on TV with the colored filters, such as that episode of Chuck last year, but this time it was in regular color, without any glasses in my case, on a specially designated 3D channel, which looks to be set to become a regular feature, especially now that all the movies are in 3D. Of course, we all just bought new HDTVs and the 3D TVs are currently very pricey, there is minimal 3D programming, everyone in the house has to get clunky glasses (unless you watch it walleyed with squishy images), etc. There is a technology that doesn't require glasses, but it's not much better than the walleyed viewing, so you probably won't be seeing it. But now I really get the feeling that we're moving into "the future", with our giant, flat, super-sharp, wide-screen, 3D TVs, Star Trekky computing/communicating devices that fit into our pockets, voice-recognizing electric cars, etc.

Now, were are my jetpack and flying car?

MJD 55296.175

Twitter

2010-04-01T15:30:00.000-07:00

I meant to do this a while ago, but I finally got around to setting up a Twitter account under @DecimalTime. You can follow it for blog updates.

MJD 55287.938

Breaking NEWS..... France to adopt metric time

2010-04-01T14:37:00.000-07:00

From about-france.com:

France will officially become the first country in the world in modern time to adopt metric time, according to documents leaked late last night to a French television station, and confirmed by a high-ranking official in Paris. The change to metric time will complete the process of metrication launched over two centuries ago following the French Revolution. Subject to official confirmation, M-Day is scheduled for April 2011, leaving French businesses, transport operators and the general public just a year to prepare for the event...

Londonderry NH net also has a good one.

MJD 55287.900

Celebrity spotted using decimal time

2010-03-27T16:13:00.000-07:00

Grammy winner John Mayer tweeted about decimal time, and specifically about the DeciTime iPhone app. Here is what he said last night, in chronological order:

Trying to switch to decimal time. 10 dours, 100 dinutes, 100 deconds. Check out the DeciTime app.
Posted 55282.109

This is what time it is now in decimal time. http://twitpic.com/1b7fmf
Posted 55282.273

It's 2:60. I really should go to bed. Maybe I'll get 3 dours of decimal sleep. On stage tomorrow night at 8:75.
Posted 55282.555

MJD 55282.967

Star Trek: The Exhibition

2010-03-19T18:47:00.000-07:00

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

Go ask Alice

2010-03-13T20:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I saw the movie Alice in Wonderland and I noticed the price tag on the Mad Hatter's hat said "10/6". I recognized that it was a price in old English currency of ten shillings and six pence. Since there were twenty shillings in a pound and twelve pence in a shilling, 10s 6d would today be equivalent to 52½p or £0.525, although halfpennies stop being minted in 1984.

That got me thinking of duodecimal measures. The words "inch" and "ounce" both come from the Latin uncia, meaning a twelfth part, and there are twelve inches in a foot, and twelve troy ounces in a troy pound, although other types of ounces no longer represent a twelfth of anything.

Years are divided into twelve months. Originally sun dials divided the period of daylight into twelve hours, which varied in length depending on location and time of year, but eventually mechanical clocks came to represent periods between midday (noon) and midnight, and these clocks are divided into twelve hours of equal length. An additional hand likewise divides each hour into twelve parts; adding marks between the numerals multiplies this division by five, giving 60 minutes, but have you ever noticed that the time is almost always rounded to the nearest multiple of five minutes, so we're still dividing hours by twelve?

A dozenal system of units would be fine, and in some ways better than decimal, but traditionally there have been only a handful of dozenal units. A shilling were divided into twelve pence, but a penny was divided into two ha'pennies or four farthings, a pound into twenty shillings, etc. Since Decimal Day, 1971 February 15 (MJD 40997), a pound is divided into 100p, period.

MJD 55269.198

Calendrier

2010-03-11T01:08:00.000-08:00

I posted before about the French Republican Calendar iPhone app called Calendrier. It seems that it has been updated. Originally it used a calculation that skipped a leap year every 128 years, so that all Republican years between 128 and 256 (1919 and 2047 CE) start on September 23. Version 1.2, released 2010 March 4 (MJD 55259/14 Ventôse an CCXVIII) has all years starting on the autumnal equinox in Paris, as during the French Revolution, with an option to display the current date according to Romme's Gregorian-style proposal to skip leap days on most century years. (Romme went to the guillotine before it could be adopted.) Under Romme's plan, all years between 200 and 300 (1991 and 2091 CE) start on September 22. Under the original rule, all years between 141 and 300 (1932 and 2091 CE) start on either September 22 or 23.

The app also now converts Gregorian dates between 1792 and 2195 CE (1 and 404 ER) to Republican dates, although apparently only by the equinoctial rule. (Not sure why the Gregorian months appear to be in Spanish.) Now I'm actually tempted to pay $1.99 for it!

MJD 55266.380

Primidi 21 Ventôse an CCXVIII à 3^hd 86^md t.m.P.

What is a planet?

2010-03-04T04:47:00.000-08:00

This week's episode of Nova on PBS, "The Pluto Files", reminded me of a story. It was around the beginning of a new century, and an astronomer was predicting that a planet existed which had yet to be discovered, and he organized a search for that planet. An object was observed and declared to be a new planet. However, the new planet was quite small, and other objects were later found to orbit in roughly the same part of the solar system, so after half a century or so, a large number of astronomers stopped calling it a planet. Then, in 2006, a proposal was made to the International Astronomical Union that would have included it as a planet, but this was rejected because it shared its region of space with other objects, so it became reclassified as a "dwarf planet".

No, I'm not talking about the subject of the Nova episode, Pluto. I am talking about the asteroid Ceres, which as discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi on the first day of the 19th century, 1801 January 1 (JD 2378862), after a missing planet between Mars and Jupiter was predicted by Johann Bode. The Kuiper belt object (KBO) Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh on 1930 February 18 (JD 2426026) after a missing planet was predicted beyond the orbit of Neptune by Percival Lowell, who had begun the search in 1906.

However, Lowell's Planet X was supposed to be massive enough to perturb the orbits of the gas giants Uranus and Neptune, and Pluto was much dimmer than expected for such a large planet. We now know that the prediction was based on inaccurate observations. Over time, estimates of its size continued to shrink, until the discovery of a moon in 1978 (JD 2443682) allowed for a precise calculation of its size, being only 18% the mass of earth's moon or 0.2% the mass of earth, itself, although it's still at least ten times heavier than Ceres, and twice as wide. But what really did Pluto in was the discovery of numerous other objects in the Kuiper belt, some nearly as large, and at least one, Eris, that was larger. It was the discovery of Eris in 2005 (JD 2453376) which forced the issue, since either Eris had to be considered a planet or Pluto not one, as well as the possibility of other new planets being discovered, and the question of where to draw the line between Pluto and its slightly smaller neighbors.

So in the end, as described in the Nova episode, it was voted (JD 2453972) that not only must a planet be round and orbit the sun, but it must also contain most of the mass in its vicinity. This excludes Pluto and its new-found neighbors, and also continues to exclude Ceres, the only asteroid large enough to be round. These round objects are now called "dwarf planets". This new distinction between "planet" and "dwarf planet" is still controversial, because Pluto still has its fans, especially those astronomers whose careers are based on it, but I do not see how any other definition would be better. As I described above, this is not the first time a planet has been demoted, and for the same reasons. Either we have one less planet, or we must allow for new ones.

But it is really just a matter of semantics. Pluto is no more or less important because we call it a planet or the first of a different kind of object, not the biggest but perhaps the closest and certainly the brightest. I am excited that in five years both Ceres and Pluto will be visited by unmanned spacecraft for the first time, allowing us to see what these dwarf planets look like in detail.

JD 2455260.033

Legacy of the French Revolution

2010-02-25T21:37:00.000-08:00

Decimal time was the law of the land for only a brief time. In 1793, during the French Revolution, decimal time was declared mandatory for public acts, starting on 1794 September 22, or 1 Vendémiaire, year III, in the new calendar. However, the law establishing the metric system on 18 Germinal, year III, (1795 April 7) suspended mandatory use just six months after it started. This did not entirely kill decimal time, though. It still continued to be used in some parts of France, such as Toulouse, for a number of years in official records, perhaps until Napoleon abolished the new calendar at the end of 1805, or maybe when ten-day weeks were dropped in 1802.

But even then, decimal time did not disappear completely. The great French astronomer and mathematician, Pierre-Simon Laplace, was enthusiastic about decimal time and had a decimal watch made. He also used decimal time in his work, Traité de Mécanique Céleste, in 1799. He represented the time of day as a decimal fraction, such as 0^j,60566. He also added the fraction to the Gregorian calendar date, such as:

...l'instant du passage au périhélie, sept.29^j,10239, temps moyen compté de minuit à Paris.

In English, that's "...the instant of perihelion passage, Sept. 29^d.10239, mean time counted from midnight at Paris." This became common practice by astronomers, with French astronomers using mean time in Paris and British astronomers using Greenwich mean time. After the British astronomer John Herschel proposed Julian days, astronomers added decimal fractions to Julian days, creating Julian Dates, which are still in wide use in astronomy, along with variants such as Modified Julian Dates. Calendar dates with times given as decimals of a day in Universal Time have been used in astronomical circulars for the past century. Others, such as computer programmers, also use decimal fractions of a day to represent time.

So these modern applications of decimal time can be linked, through Laplace, to the decimal time established back in the 18th century during the French Revolution, and possibly inspired the stardates that are projected in future centuries.

MJD 55253.234

Octidi 8 Ventôse an CCXVIII à 2^hd 41^md t.m.P.

New pages

2010-02-20T19:02:00.001-08:00

I have posted several pages on this site which were on the old site, links to which may be found at the top of this blog. They are still a work in progress, and I have to fix all the internal and external links and make other updates.

I also made changes to the decimal times in the sidebar. For the local decimal time, I now use the Excel (for PC) serial date, which includes local time as a fractional day, the same as the calendar date in the title bar. I also moved the French republican date (Calendrier Républicain) into the same gadget and made it update with decimal seconds.

So the decimal time is represented in up to five different time zones:

Excel for local time
NASA/NORAD Two-Line Element for Universal Time = GMT
Julian Date for astronomical time = GMT + 12h
Swatch for Biel Mean Time (actually Central European Winter Time or British Summer Time) = GMT + 1h
Republican calendar for Paris mean time (temps moyen de Paris) = GMT + 9m21s

MJD 55248.125

Site design

2010-02-11T17:12:00.000-08:00

As you can see, I've made some changes to the site. In order to match the original logo, I've changed the background from black to white. The image does not fit well at the top, so I've put it on top of the sidebar. Perhaps I'll create one that fits the new site better later. I also restored the favorites icon (favicon) which is based on the same image, replacing the Blogger icon. [And added an Apple Touch icon, so I can add it to my iPhone.] I am also working on adding back some of the other pages from the old site, such as the one on calendars. Unfortunately, the URL has to be slightly different, so any incoming links will still be broken. :(

MJD 55239.050

Pads

2010-02-09T03:25:00.000-08:00

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

Lunar Holidays

2010-02-04T21:30:00.000-08:00

"The Holidays" are considered to be at the end of the (solar) year, but around the beginning of the year there are a series of holidays which are based upon the phases of the moon. These are determined according to various lunar calendars, which are sometimes called luni-solar calendars, because they are periodically adjusted by adding months to keep them somewhat synchronized with the solar seasons.
The first such holiday is Chinese New Year. It is also celebrated in other Asian countries, and is known as Tet in Viet Nam. Here in San Francisco, there is a large Chinese community (and a somewhat smaller Vietnamese one) so this is an important holiday here. The annual Chinese New Year parade here is famous, but few know that it does not happen on the New Year. The celebration actually lasts for more than two weeks, and the parade is held at the end, or actually on the nearest Saturday. The New Year itself usually begins on the second new moon after winter solstice, which this year is February 14 (MJD 55242), coincidentally on Valentine's Day . The Spring Festival is officially celebrated here on the following full moon on February 28 (55256), which is a Sunday, with the parade on the preceding Saturday. In China, the celebration ends with the Lantern Festival, which is March 1 (55257) this year. This coming year is the Year of the Tiger in Chinese astrology, as was my birth year.

Right after the Chinese New Year is the Catholic holiday, Ash Wednesday. It often falls near the Chinese New Year new moon, or the next new moon a month later. It's usually right after a new moon, but can also be a day or so before. This year it is on February 17 (55244). This marks the beginning of Lent. Growing up in the Catholic Church, I had to go to mass and get ashes on my forehead on Ash Wednesday. The day before is celebrated as Mardi Gras, also known as Carnaval or Shrove Tuesday, which is traditionally the last day to feast before the Lenten fast.

Lent ends on Easter Sunday, which is April 4 (55290) this year. It is the Sunday following the first full moon after March 21, which the Church considers to be the first day of spring in the Gregorian calendar, even when it isn't. This year the full moon is on Tuesday, March 30 (55285) so Easter is the following Sunday. Growing up, this meant that we got to color eggs and eat candy, when we got back from church.

Few in this country know that there are sometimes two Easters, Eastern and Western. This year they coincide, but in the Eastern Orthodox church (and other eastern churches) Easter can sometimes follow in the next Sunday, or after the next full moon, four or five weeks later, because they still use the Julian calendar to compute holidays. I have Greek relations by marriage who celebrate the Orthodox holidays.

I also have Jewish relations by marriage, who celebrate holidays on the Jewish lunar calendar. Originally, Easter was based upon the Jewish holiday of Pesach, or Passover. This holiday lasts seven or eight days, beginning on the full moon that falls on the 14th day of the month of Nisan. Since Jewish days start at sunset, this year that is the evening of Monday, March 29 (55284). Easter often occurs during Passover, as it does this year, but since Christians now use their own calculations, Passover is sometimes a month after Easter. I usually celebrate this with my in-laws. Other Jewish holidays also are connected to the phases of the moon; for instance, the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah, is on a new moon near the equinox in September.

Muslims also use a lunar calendar, but theirs is purely lunar, so it drifts every year in relation to the solar calendar. They have holidays on new moons, including the new year (Al-Hajra) and the beginning and end of Ramadan, but these can happen on any date in the Gregorian calendar. The current Muslim year began around December 18 (55548) and Ramadan begins around August 11 (55419). The exact dates depend upon actual observations of the new moon, and can vary from place to place.

So even though we have a solar calendar, for me, at least, the phases of the moon are significant on my social calendar.

MJD 55232.230
21st of Sh'vat, 5770 כ״א בְּשְׁבָט תש״ע

Decimated

2010-02-01T05:04:00.000-08:00

The Economist online, of all places, posted an article on January 15 (55211) titled Decimated: What if Napoleon hadn’t abolished decimal time? The article talks about decimal time, the Egyptian calendar, decimal angle, etc. It is not entirely accurate. For instance, Napoleon did not abolish decimal time; it came and went before he came to power, although he did abolish the ten-day week. And dual-face decimal clocks were not numerous in France in the 19th century, and certainly not elsewhere; almost all of them were made in the early 1790s. It does mention Lagrange's suggestion for déci-jour and centi-jour, but he did not "try in vain" to get these as part of the metric system because France already had decimal time units. As for the "compass", decimal angles called "grads" are actually common on calculators today, although I am not sure who uses them. (The "gon" mentioned in the article is another word for the same thing.) Then the article goes into hexadecimal time. I'm not sure who uses that, either. Unix time and Microsoft's filetime are mentioned, but not other systems, such as Microsoft Excel's decimal time and date.

By way of Calendar_Reform_with_Metric_and_Decimal_Time_Adoption.

MJD 55228.544
Tridi 13 Pluviôse an CCXVIII à 5^hd 51^md t.m.P.

Decimal Time Converter app

2010-01-30T01:01:00.000-08:00

I've been posting a lot here about iPhone/IPod Touch/IPad apps, but I haven't mentioned the one app that actually has "decimal time" in it's name, Decimal Time Converter by CodeBurners (free). That is because it is a different type of decimal time.
This form of decimal time is actually widely used, mostly for calculating payrolls, and decimal hour time clocks are pretty common, that record tenths and hundredths of hours, rather than dividing the day by powers of ten. I have not found a good reference that describes this decimal time, although there are plenty of conversion charts and calculators for it. Rather than being used for time of day, standard hours are divided decimally in order do math with time intervals, without having to convert between the different standard time units, like hours, minutes and seconds.

What this particular app does is convert between standard hours and minutes (HH:MM), hours with decimal fractions (HH.HH), and minutes (MMMM). For instance, 689 hours and 40 minutes is 689.67 hours or 41360 minutes.

This form of decimal time is basically what was proposed by the French Commission de décimalisation du temps, led by Poincaré, in the 1890s, that standard hour be divided into 100 minutes, and each minute into 100 seconds. This proposal was abandoned, but at some point it became common in business.

iPad apps

2010-01-29T00:35:00.000-08:00

You have probably heard by now about the new Apple tablet that Steve Jobs announced here on Wednesday, the iPad. Since it will run iPhone apps, that means that all the decimal time apps will work on the iPad the day it's released. I have made a list on the right side of the page of all the apps I have posted about on this blog.

I don't know about apps on other devices, such as Android phones. Does anyone else?

Metriclock iPhone app

2010-01-25T03:34:00.000-08:00

Decimal time apps keep appearing. Metriclock by Stotion was released on January 23 (55219) for $0.99. It is not only a clock, but also a "metric stopwatch and metric timer". The units have new names. Decimal hours/decidays are called "alkas", decimal minutes/millidays are called "zimits" and decimal seconds are called "ozzis", I don't know why. I have not tried it, but I see from the app store that it features a digital display with multicolored digits and a plain dark background.

The associated website is http://floint.com, which is in Flash, and therefore cannot be viewed on an iPhone. Doh! It's also difficult to view on my laptop, since it's a huge image which is larger than my screen, but I can see that it shows some pics of the app running on an iPhone.

MJD 55221.482

Wither Swatch .beats?

2010-01-23T22:28:00.000-08:00

Apparently Swatch no longer sells .beat watches. These were the only mass-produced watches with decimal time. Fortunately, they are still available on eBay, where I bought one a few years ago. I stopped wearing it when the band broke; I'm not much for wristwatches anyway, and I use my mobile for the time, like most people now. Now the battery is dying, so the display is blinking and the light does not come on, but it still works, for the moment.
I do not like so-called Biel Mean Time, which is actually Central European (Winter) Time or British Summer Time. Swatch starts counting .beats from midnight in Switzerland, which is one hour ahead of GMT/UTC, and eight or nine hours of my local time. However, you do not have to use BMT on a Swatch .beat watch! You can set your .beats to any timezone. So if it's midnight where you live, your .beat watch can display @000. This corresponds to the time in Excel serial dates, such as 40202.0000000. Or you can set @000 to midnight UT so that it corresponds to Modified Julian Dates, such as 55220.000, or set @000 to noon UT like original Julian Dates, such as 2455221.000. Or you can treat the .beats as decimal minutes, so @000 is the same as 0.00 or 0h00 or however you prefer to write it.

It's a shame that Swatch no longer makes .beat watches, but they still use .beats on their website, so perhaps they will bring them back in the future. Basically, .beats are a feature of their digital watches, so since digital watches are out of fashion, so are .beats, but at least it's possible that they will return in the future. It's also possible that wristwatches will go the way of pocket watches.

@311
MJD 55220.269

Decimal time notation

2010-01-19T05:42:00.000-08:00

For some time I have looked for examples of how decimal time was used in France, so that I can represent it accurately in my scripts. Most of them are written out in full, as in "five hours and fifty minutes decimal". In both French and English of the period, it was customary to write a small "h", "m" and "s" after the hours, minutes and seconds, respectively, and even today it is common in French to put an "h" between the hour and minute, instead of a colon. It therefore seemed likely to me that they would have written decimal times in a similar way, although they would have to distinguishable from standard times.

I have been trying to read Essai sur l'unification internationale de l'heure (Essay on the international unification of the hour) by Joseph Charles François de Rey-Pailhade, published in 1893. Mostly it is about his proposal to use the centiday and the milliday, which he called cé and decicé, but he also writes about related subjects, including decimal time from a century previous, and includes examples such as:

3 heures 93 minutes (système décimal) 3^hd 93^md

It's a bit awkward to use double letters for each unit, but it seems likely to be correct, so I going to use this notation from now on.

Decadi 30 Nivôse an CCXVIII à 5^hd 77^md t.m.P.
MJD 55215.570

Swatch .beats/Internet Time apps

2010-01-17T14:19:00.000-08:00

I already mentioned earlier one free Swatch beats/Internet Time app for iPhone/iPod Touch, Internet Beat by Thomas Cherry. Dennis pointed out in his comment that this app has a bug, because it updates once per second, and a centibeat is less than one second, so it sometimes skips a centibeat. This is a pretty minor bug. However, I have noticed a bigger one. Half the time, when you turn the phone from portrait to landscape, the number of .beats changes. This is because when the centibeats are displayed in landscape mode you are seeing the exact number of .beats, but when in portrait mode it is rounded to the nearest .beat, instead of simply truncating. For example, @199.50 becomes @200. This is like saying that 1:59:30 is 2:00. A clock should not do that. If you go to the official Swatch website you will see that the app is half a .beat fast when in portrait mode, or 43 seconds.

I also found another app, InternetTime by Jaewon Choi for $0.99. I have not tried it, but I can see from the picture that it displays a map of the earth in the background, with approximate areas of day and night. It also shows the current date, and unlike the other app displays leading zeros, such as @090 instead of @90.

@971
MJD 55213.930

Metric Clock iPhone app by Ecce

2010-01-16T20:00:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Ecce for letting me have the Metric Clock app for testing. The iTunes price is $0.99. If anybody else wants to provide me with an app, or to post about anything else relating to decimal time, or anything at all, just use the email link in my profile. (I just fixed it.)

It's certainly the prettiest decimal time app I've used. It comes with a nice background image, or you can use any image from your photo library. If you get tired of metric, it will also display a standard 12-hour clock. The clock itself is a typical round, analog dial, which can be resized and repositioned anywhere on the screen. You can also select from eleven different colors and the level of transparency, although the numbers are always black, so if you make the clock face black and set transparency to minimum, you won't be able to see it! Or you can view a digital display in the form h.mm.ss. Seconds are optional for both analog and digital.

There is an optional progress bar that displays the time as a percentage, so one hour and eighty minutes past midnight is displayed simply as 18, and increments every 10 decimal minutes, or 14.4 standard minutes, just like Rey-Pailhade's cés. There is also a progress bar for the year, which increments every 3.65 days, and one for your life, which displays the percentage of years from your birth to your life expectancy, which you can set.

One slight drawback is that you cannot turn off auto-lock from inside the app, so you have to exit and go into your iPhone settings to turn it off and on, or else the display will turn off after a minute or so. It does switch automatically from portrait to landscape mode, however.

MJD 55213.166

Laplace

2010-01-10T05:12:00.000-08:00

I have read that the great French mathematician and astronomer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, was enthusiastic about decimal time, and used it in his work Traité de Mécanique Céleste. (Treatise on Celestial Mechanics) Unfortunately, I have been unable to find all five volumes online, and reading what is available is difficult, as it is highly technical and full of math, and I don't speak French. But according to a translation by Nathaniel Bowditch, he wrote in his preface:

I shall adopt the decimal division of the right angle, and of the day, and shall refer the linear measures to the length of the metre, determined by the arc of the terrestrial meridian comprised between Dunkirk and Barcelona.

I thought that I might find a description of decimal time, or at least examples of how decimal times were written in France during the Revolution, something like 10^h98^m76^s. However, the few examples I found look like this one:

... et la distance périhélie, égale à 1,053095 ; ce qui a donné pour l'instant du passage au périhélie, sept.29^j,10239, temps moyen compté de minuit à Paris.

Les valeurs précédentes de a, b, h, l, relatives à trois observations, ont donné la distance périhélie égale à 1,053650; et pour l'instant du passage, sept.29^j,04587; ce qui diffère peu des résultats fondés sur cinq observations.

Roughly translated, this says:

...and the perihelion distance, equal to 1.053095, which gave for the moment of perihelion passage, Sept. 29^d.10239, mean time counted from midnight in Paris.

The previous values of a, b, h, l, relative to three observations, gave the perihelion distance equal to 1.053650, and for the moment of passage, Sept. 29^d.04587; which differs slightly from the results based on five observations.

Note that the superscript "j" stands for jour, meaning "day", and that the French use a comma as the decimal mark. So Laplace is expressing the decimal time as a decimal fraction of a day in Paris mean time and adding it to the date. This is how times are given in astronomical circulars today, except that now the times are UT, and the unit symbol is omitted. So ,10239 would correspond to 1h2m39s decimal time, and ,04587 to 10h45m87s, or 1:06:03 a.m.

He also gives times without dates, such as 0^j,681798, which Bowditch renders as 0^day,681798. This is essentially identical to how Herschel wrote them a half-century later, e.g. 0^d·286003.

MJD 55206.55

French Republican Date

2010-01-06T18:08:00.000-08:00

I have posted the current republican date at the top of this blog, according to the original equinoctial rule, although for the current year this is the same as both Brumaire and Romme. minutes ahead of GMT.

The first part is the weekday, there being ten days in the week, or décade. The following number is the day of month, 1-30. Then is the month name. The five or six complementary days at the end of the year in September are treated as a thirteen month. "An" is the French word for year, and is followed by the year of the Republican Era, in Roman numerals; year 218 (CCXVIII) started in 2009. The "à" is a French preposition which precedes the time, which is given in decimal hours (hd) and decimal minutes (md). Midnight is 10 hd. The initials t.m.P. stands for temps moyen de Paris, or Paris mean time, which is 6.5 decimal minutes (561 standard seconds) ahead of GMT. The date may be off a day from your local time, depending on whether it is before or after midnight in Paris.

Octidi 18 Nivôse an CCXVIII à 10^hd95^md t.m.P.
MJD 55203.0

Calendrier- French Revolution Calendar

2010-01-03T06:24:00.000-08:00

I posted earlier about decimal time iPhone apps. I had also searched for an app for the French republican/revolutionary calendar, as the calendar was tied together with decimal time. I even searched the French word "calendrier", but did not find one. This calendar was used from 1793 to 1805, and replaced the 7-day week with the 10-day décade, with exactly three décades (i.e. 30 days) a month and five or six extra days at the end of the year, which began on the autumnal equinox in September.

Well, now there is an app for that, too, released December 20 (MJD 55185). It's called Calendrier- French Revolution Calendar by Kawasemi Corp. (José Luis Martín Mas) and costs $1.99.

I thought that name was familiar; he's the same one who made the Mac Dashboard widget, with whom I've communicated before. As I remember, instead of the years always starting on the equinox, he uses an odd rule that every fourth year be a leap year, except for years divisible by 128. That means that in this app the current year CCXVIII (218) started on 2009 Sept. 23 (55097) even though the equinox was on Sept. 22 (55096). However, the next autumnal equinox is on Sept. 23, so the two versions will coincide the next republican year, although some use yet a different version, with a leap year rule similar to the Gregorian calendar, that starts on Sept. 22. BTW, today's French republican date would be 13 Nivôse CCXVIII, Tridi, Décade 2, according to the app, or Quartidi, 14 Nivôse, according to the other versions.

It also displays the decimal time, like the other apps, although digital only. That makes a total of four apps which display French decimal time.

MJD 55199.6
Quartidi 14 Nivôse an CCXVIII à 6h6 t.m.P.

The 10s

2010-01-01T01:36:00.000-08:00

The odometer has rolled over from 20091231 to 20100101. An new day, new month, new year, new decade, at least for the Gregorian calendar. Of course, it's only 20091219 on the Julian calendar, and something else on every other calendar. You can see a few of them at Calendrica. That's why integer dates were introduced, to sort through this confusion of calendars. For instance, Julian dates start from the year 4713 BCE and count days continuously. No years, months, weeks, just days. Modified Julian dates use a more recent epoch, in 1858, while truncated Julian dates count from 1968. Excel serial dates count days from 1900 CE. Unix time is finer, counting seconds from 1970.

So happy 2455197!

MJD 55197.4

The 00s

2009-12-29T04:58:00.000-08:00

There are only a couple of days left in this decade and I still don't know what to call it. The ohs? The zeros? The two-thousands? The hundreds? The aughts? The BBC is calling it the noughties. Most people seem to refer to it simply as "this decade". Next week, they'll be calling it "last decade". What is the proper name for the years 2000-2009 of the Common Era?

MJD 55194.5

Metric time

2009-12-25T01:18:00.000-08:00

Many, perhaps most, references to decimal time of day refer to it as "metric time". I have noticed, however, that advocates of the metric system get annoyed by those who want "metric time" added to the metric system, because time is already included! Although the original metric system did not include a unit of time interval, the modern SI metric system does: the second. Standard metric prefixes are commonly applied in scientific use, including milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, etc. However, larger metric units are not as common, and SI has compromised by allowing non-decimal multiples, such as minutes, hours and days, to be used with metric units. So the problem with metric time is not that there is none, but that metric and older units are being used together.

Any arbitrary unit of time would work as a metric base unit. The second has been adopted, but it could have been the day or hour or anything else. The real issue is how to divide the day so that people can organize their activities. The metric system does not help, since there are 86.4 kiloseconds in a day. So instead we still use hours and minutes.

MJD 55190.3

An introduction to decimal time

2009-12-22T17:59:00.000-08:00

I just came across this page on the world-time-zones.org website. It does a pretty decent job of describing decimal time. I have a few comments about the actual decimal times displayed there, however.

The time in China shows hundredths of a day, since midnight Beijing standard time (GMT+8h). It also displays decimal fractions of two digits, i.e. hundredths of hundredths, which AFAIK were never used by the Chinese, who had other ways of designating smaller units. I also doubt they ever used Western digits to write the time this way, but that's OK for a web page written in English.

The so-called time in France is actually an hour (41.66 decimal minutes) fast. The page must have been written in summertime, and the author forgot to account for DST. France uses Central European Time, which is only one hour ahead of GMT/UTC in winter, but two in the summer. Of course, during the Revolution, the French did not use CET, GMT or any standard time, but true solar time. The mean solar time in Paris is 9 minutes 21 seconds ahead of GMT, or 6.49 decimal minutes. But as I write this, their clocks are set one hour ahead of GMT, not two.

They use the modern colon separators, although traditionally the time is written in French by separating the hours and minutes with an 'h' and the minutes and seconds with an 'm', even today. They also use '0' for the first hour after midnight, just as I do, although the revolutionaries used '10'.

Then they display 'UTC in Internet (Swatch) Time' and 'local time (in Internet Swatch time)', which makes absolutely no sense! Internet Time is always one standard hour (41.66 .beats) ahead of UTC, and is never displayed relative to any other timezone. And they show fractional .beats to 13 digits! Swatch never even displays one digit, although some third-party applications might show two or three, but never 13. And they did not include the obligatory '@' symbol.

And, although they mention that, 'Today, scientists, astronomers and computer programmers all persist in using decimal-based systems, using fractional days to give the precision required for certain recording and calculation', they fail to provide any examples, such as Julian Dates or Excel serial dates.

These are mostly minor quibbles, however. Otherwise, they do a pretty good job describing decimal time.

MJD 55188.0

New Stardates

2009-12-15T23:12:00.000-08:00

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.
For instance, Kirk was stated to be born on stardate "twenty-two thirty-three zero four". Other stardates are in the form nnnn.nn. According to Memory Alpha, which quotes one of the screenwriters, the first four digits represent the year, and the decimal represents the ordinal day of year, from .1 to .365, so the stardate would be written 2233.04, which means that Kirk must have been born on Friday, 2233 January 4 CE (MJD 136649). According to the official website at startrek.com, he was born on 2233 March 2 (MJD 136707), but the stress of battle could have caused premature delivery. Other sources give different dates for this and other events, and I don't think that there is other date that is "canon", but a canonical stardate for his birth is 1277.1, from his very first episode.

The original five-year mission is usually assumed to have started around 2264 or 2265, but in the movie has the main events taking place on stardate 2258.42, or 2258 Feb. 11 (MJD 136687), apparently during Kirk's third year in the Academy, although that would make him 25 years old, and startrek.com puts his years there more believably as 2250-4.

So now we have a completely different sort of stardate, which is simply an ordinal date similar to that of ISO-8601, e.g. stardate 2233.04 = 2233-004. This makes them easier to use than the original stardates, which really made no sense, although now they're more likely to get in trouble by tying events to precise dates. And there is no mention of the time of day, which is presumably represented like our military time, rather than as a decimal time. I think I'll stick with the original stardates, or at least the TNG/DS9/VOY stardates.

MJD 55181.3

Decimal time in science fiction

2009-12-14T08:50:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-12T09:57:00.000-08:00

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

Times on this blog

2009-12-09T01:03:00.000-08:00

To the right you can now view the "current decimal time", which I will explain.

The local decimal time is in French Revolution format, with ten decimal hours per day, one hundred minutes per hour and one hundred seconds per minute, counting from local midnight. Unlike the French revolutionaries, I made the midnight hour be 0 instead of 10.

MJD is the Modified Julian Date, in which the digits left of the decimal are a count of days, and the digits to the right are the time expressed as a fractional day counted from midnight GMT/UTC. Thus, .98765 is the same as 9^hd 87^md 65^sd GMT.

Swatch counts 1000 .beats per day, from midnight at their HQ in Switzerland, which is one hour ahead of GMT. Thus, @987 is the same as 9^hd 87^md Central European Time.

MJD 55174.3

Temps Decimal

2009-12-03T17:00:00.000-08:00

I found an interesting book in French on Google Books called Temps Decimal by J. de Rey-Pailhade, civil engineer of mines, published 1894. He proposed using the centijour (centiday), abbreviated cé, with metric submultiples such as decicé, etc.

MJD 55169.0

There's an app for that

2009-12-01T20:02:00.000-08:00

There are, in fact, several decimal time apps for the iPhone. I found three which display French decimal clocks.

French Revolutionary Clock by Miller Tinkerhess is simply a photo of an antique decimal clock from the French Revolution, with the hands animated to show the local time in decimal hours, minutes and seconds. There are no other features, but it looks pretty cool. It costs $0.99.
DeciTime by tin:b Software (Robert Fisher) uses colored arcs or slices to display local decimal time. The colors can be changed and there are four different analog clock styles, including one with regular hands. The units are called "dour", "dinute" and "decond", apparently after http://serg.us/dime/. The decimal time can also be displayed digitally. It also costs $0.99.
MetricClock by ecce is also $0.99. I have not downloaded it, but it apparently differs from the others by allowing different background images to be used. Either analog or digital time can be displayed, and it also shows progress bars for the day, year and/or your expected lifetime.

If you prefer the time in Switzerland to your own local time, there's an app for that, too.

Internet Beat by Thomas Cherry displays the Swatch Internet Beat time, which divides the day into 1000 "beats", from @0 to @999, with @0 being midnight at Swatch's HQ in Biel, Switzerland, i.e. Central European Time. When you rotate the phone, it shows hundredths. This is a free app.

There are some apps which display Unix time used by some computers and some which show date/time used by astronomers.

Astrodate by Flying Titans, Inc., which converts the current date and time into several varieties of Julian Date. It costs $0.99.
iEphemeris Lite by Marco Piccone displays the current Julian Date, along with astronomical data on the moon, and is free.

There are a number of apps which use decimal time for payroll and such, which divide hours into hundredths, like employee time clocks do.

Finally, I also found a couple of stardate apps, which display a "stardate" based on the current date, although they each give very different results, and are not exactly what I would consider decimal time, but may be useful for trekkies who want to geek out. :)

iStardate by SusaSoftX ($0.99) displays stardates which look like [-28]1456.06. I dunno, that doesn't look to me like the ones in the captains' logs. Brackets? Minus sign? I know these are the same stardates used by Google, which were devised by Andrew Main, but I never liked them. Anyway, the app is supposed to be used as a clock, which I guess means it increments 0.01 every 2 or 3 minutes, or 5.00 per day. Meh.
StarDate Calculator Pro by Triangle Powers Software is free. (Why "pro" then?) It opens with the current stardate, which looks like 63201.5, and you can select other calendar dates to convert, although for some reason the dial always starts on September 26. These stardates increment about 2.7 per day, or 1000.0 per year.

MJD 55167.1

First Post

2009-12-01T17:38:00.000-08:00

I don't expect anyone to follow this blog, but in case someone stumbles upon it, I'll explain why I created it.

Before the Web, many individuals, including myself, speculated about the decimal reform of time, mostly in isolation from each other and from a wider audience. The early days of the Web saw many of these individuals posting their ideas online. Many of them were different from each other, while some shared similarities. I determined to make a survey of all of them, and to provide a forum for the proponents to interact. Alas, I was almost too late. Most of the existing sites were already stagnant, their authors having moved on to other interests, and with these sites already existing, and then with my own comprehensive site and later with Wikipedia, it seems that speculation was stifled by the glut of information on the subject.

My site never had more than a handful of followers, and eventually it was mostly me, talking to myself. When my site went down unexpectedly, I decided to simply let it go. I have not thought about it much since then, but recently I have come across a few things that I would have posted about on my forum, and I thought, why not just blog it?

So here is a place I will post occasional things about decimal time, or anything else that crosses my mind.

MJD 55167.0

[I've imported posts from an earlier version of this blog from 2008, which were "off-topic" for the old Decimal Time board.]

Happy New Year!

2008-09-22T04:32:00.000-07:00

Autumn starts today, and that makes it the first day of the year 217 in the French Republican Calendar. Also, next week is Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the year in the Jewish calendar. Around the same time is Eid ul-Fitr, the end of the Moslem holy month of Ramadan. So enjoy!

Darwin was wrong

2008-09-20T02:46:00.000-07:00

Recently the 150th anniversary was commemorated of Charles Darwin's letter which was read to the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858, on the subject of "natural selection", which was followed in 1859 by his famous book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, often shortened to The Origin of Species. (Thank goodness!) In the process, he pissed off a lot of religious people, and they're still pissed off to this day. In fact, there's a whole industry of creationists who try to cast doubt on his ideas. One way they do this is by quoting any scientist who says that Darwin was wrong about any detail.

Of course, Darwin was wrong about many details. He was writing 150 years ago! Science has moved on since then, and discovered things like Mendelian heredity, mutations, DNA, population genetics, the genome, etc. Heredity was a particular problem for him, and he threw out a hypothesis which turned out to be completely wrong. However, he was right on most of the important stuff, like natural selection, common ancestry and descent with modification, all of which fit in nicely with later developments.

I have been interested in this subject since elementary school, and over the years I have occasionally been aware that there was some debate amongst legitimate biologists on the importance of darwinism, i.e. natural selection, versus other things, such as genetic drift. None of them claim that natural selection does not happen, just that other things are more important.

Recently, I read a blog post that clarified the debate for me. (I forget where, but will post a link when I find it.) I realize that what some are saying is that the title of Darwin's book was off! That is, that the origin of species do not arise through natural selection, but through processes such as genetic drift. This relates to the common definition of species as a population which breeds only with itself, and is incapable of breeding with other populations.

What happens when species originate is that a population becomes isolated for one reason or another from other populations, and over time these separated populations diverge genetically until they can no longer interbreed, even when they are no longer isolated from each other, because when they have sex with each other, fertilization does not occur, or the offspring may be nonviable or sterile in marginal cases, because their genomes are no longer compatible with each other.

Note that this has nothing directly to do with natural selection. Natural selection operates at the level of phenotype, allowing populations to adapt to their environments. However, natural selection alone is not responsible for preventing fertilization of unions. Natural selection can happen relatively quickly with large changes, and yet the different-looking groups can still interbreed. On the other hand, populations can differ little from each other outwardly and yet be incapable of interbreeding due to accumulated random mutations in their genomes, which takes a relatively long time to happen.

What we're talking about is two different aspects of evolution: phenotype and genotype. Phenotype is the outward expression of the genes, which is strongly influenced by adaptation through natural selection, while genotype is the sequence of DNA base pairs, which is affected by both selection and random effects including mutations and genetic drift. The phenotype is what we see changing during evolution, and the evolution of the genotype is invisible, but causes separate populations to become different species. Paleontologists study phenotypic evolution, because that's all that is preserved in the fossil record, but geneticists study genotypic evolution, which has only more recently been observable. For example, domestic dogs have evolved vastly different forms (although the selection was artificial, rather than natural), even though all breeds are almost identical genetically, and they can all interbreed with wild wolves; but there are species, such as various species of mosquitoes, which appear identical and yet cannot interbreed. (If you prefer vertebrate examples, I'm sure there are some, too.)

So even though Darwin is still right on the central laws of evolution: common ancestry, descent with modification by means of natural selection, etc., on the issue of how species originate, which is in the title of his book, he is now thought to have been wrong. However, to be fair, there are other, older definitions of species, for which having different adaptations was the important criteria, rather than genetic compatibility, so it could be considered to be more about semantics, and in the context of the science of his day, he was probably right. After all, he was talking about the "preservation of favoured races", by which he meant populations, and the means by which they came to appear in the record while others became extinct.

In any event, the creationists are never right, even if Darwin was wrong.

iPod Nation

2008-09-19T04:38:00.000-07:00

I finally got an iPod. Actually, my wife did. She was expressing her frustration with CD players, so I suggested that she get an MP3 player, instead. To my surprise, she actually did, a 1GB iPod Shuffle. I imported all her CDs, and now she's happy as a clam. (Whatever that means.) And we're sharing it. I'm not big into music (the radio is fine for my musical tastes) but I like talk radio. The problem with listening to radio programs is that I cannot pay attention to them when I have a customer, and in between customers, too often I get ads, boring stuff, or just don't get enough of what they're talking about. I sometimes listen to four radios simultaneously: the 2-way taxi radio (which I'm supposed to listen to at all times), the car stereo (on which I play music for my customers), NPR through the FM receiver on my cell phone in one ear bud, and AM talk on a portable radio in the other. When something interesting comes in on one, I turn down the others.

Plus, some shows come on when I'm sleeping during the day. But on the iPod, I can listen whenever I want, and I can pause the podcasts when I'm talking with a customer. And, of course, I can listen to other podcasts off the Internet. I tried using my cell phone as an MP3 player, but it didn't work well, because it's hard to get them uploaded, the capacity is very limited, and if I actually have to use my phone or get a text message, I have to stop the podcast and then start over from the beginning, with no fast-forward. But the iPod lets me stop and start, and also rewind or fast-forward.

So, I've joined the minions of the iPod Nation, with the white wires coming out of my ears, tuning out the world while trying to stay connected to it.

Pluto

2008-08-14T17:30:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago there was a big brouhaha over whether Pluto is a planet. The International Astronomical Union declared that it is not. The controversy has popped up once again, as seen on blogs such as Bad Astronomy, Universe Today and The Planetary Society. The problem arose because when Pluto was discovered in 1930, it was believed to be Planet X, a large planet which was perturbing the orbit of Neptune. Well, better observations proved that there is no such perturbation, and that Pluto is relatively tiny, smaller than our moon. It was unlike all other planets in other ways, as well. Then astronomers started finding similar objects, some of them nearly as large as Pluto, and eventually they found one which was larger. Astronomers such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson had already been disputing Pluto's classification as a planet, and this brought the controversy to a head. Either we had to accept this new object, and possibly many others, as planets, or admit that Pluto is not one.

The problem was that there was no accepted definition of what a planet is. Originally, the Greeks called anything that moved in the sky a planet, which included the star-like Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, as well as the sun and moon, but not the earth. After Copernicus and Galileo showed that most of these orbited the sun, rather than us, the earth was recognized as being a planet, and the sun and moon were recategorized. This worked fine, until a couple of hundred years ago when astronomers accidentally discovered Uranus orbiting far past Saturn, which fit in with the other planets. They wondered why there was a large gap between Mars and Jupiter, and when they looked found something, a small, round body which was recognized as a planet and named Ceres. However, Ceres was tiny compared to other planets, and then other small bodies were found in the same region, which were then reclassified together as "minor planets", or asteroids. Around this time, oddities in the orbit of Uranus led to the discovery of Neptune, making for eight planets.

Inaccurate measurements of Neptune's orbit led to the belief that there must be another large planet, called Planet X. This led to the discovery of Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. As with Ceres, after several decades and the discovery of numerous other bodies in the same region, Pluto was demoted. Some people are still unhappy about this, and consider Pluto to be a planet. This all begs the question of what is a planet? It really comes down to semantics. It's easy to classify things when the differences between them are large, but when there is a range of intermediate objects, then the question of where to draw the line becomes rather arbitrary.

The most obvious place to draw the line is on whether the object is round. This would include little Ceres as well as Pluto and a number of objects past Neptune. The problem with this is that there may be a great many small, round objects. (That a planet must be orbiting the sun, and not some other body in the solar system, is agreed by everyone; then it would be a moon.) There are also some smaller bodies that are kind of round, and no planet is perfectly round, so how round does it have to be? It is even possible for a non-round object to be larger than a round one. And then there is the question of planets outside our solar system; some are large enough that they border on being small, dark stars. And obviously none of these are orbiting the sun; there are probably planets out there which don't orbit stars, having been kicked out by some other object at some point.

Two years ago, the IAU declared a new definition for a planet, which had three criteria: it has to orbit the sun, be round, and also contain most of the mass in its region. Ceres and Pluto do not qualify on the last count, and so they were designated "dwarf planets". Now, they want to create a new category, called "plutoid".

My opinion is, that it does not matter whether we call Pluto a planet or not. It does not change what Pluto actually is. It's simply a matter of convenience, not a real distinction. I'm inclined to not include Pluto, rather than adding a lot of similarly sized objects, but it really doesn't matter. It's just as important that it be studied, no matter what we call it. And fortunately, there is a space probe already on the way there.

I miss POPCORN

2008-08-13T04:55:00.000-07:00

For most of my life, I have been able to get the exact time of day over the telephone, set by atomic clocks. Here in Northern California, the usual number to call was 767-2676, which is better known by the letters POPCORN. It must have been started by AT&T way back when, and continued for years by Pacific Bell. Then PacBell got absorbed by SBC, which shortly after merged with the rump AT&T, and the new AT&T canceled the service last September, which I found out when Daylight Saving Time ended. As Lily Tomlin said, "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."

Now, it could be argued that it's not necessary anymore, since many devices are synced to atomic time, including cable boxes and computers. In fact, the very cell phones that we use to call POPCORN display the time updated from the cell network, and many people use their phone instead of a watch. My problem with this is that, the time is usually wrong! That is, I have noticed that it can be as much as a minute off from atomic time. I don't know why; maybe it updates occassionally and then drifts inbetween updates. Now, that is not much, and I can live with that most of the time, but when I am setting the clock on my car dashboard, or wherever, I want it to the second, not a minute off.

Fortunately, I have free long distance in the contiguous US, so I can call WWV at 303-499-7111, which is operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This gives the time in both Mountain Time and UTC, which is good enough. I don't call it very often; mostly when the time changes twice a year, or when the dashboard clock gets reset at the shop. But it's nice to know it's there.

Well, my cab got worked on the other day, and I needed to reset the clock. But when I called WWV, I got no answer. I called back several times and finally got an answer, but when I called again it just rang again. I am not sure, but I suspect that they have been getting a lot more calls since the end of POPCORN and similar numbers across the country, and are exceding their capacity. Or it could be just a coincidence.

Georgia on my mind

2008-08-13T03:26:00.000-07:00

I recently drove some Georgians in my taxi, and they explained about how depressed they were about what is happening in their home. I've been watching the depressing news over the past few days about the conflict in the country of Georgia, on American, British and Russian media, which give different versions. It apparently started when Georgian forces attempted to take over the breakaway region of South Ossetia, which has been supported by Russia. The Russians retaliated. Both sides are blaming the other; Russia is accusing Georgia of "genocide", while Georgia is accusing Russia of "ethnic cleansing" and attempting "regime change". I think that both share blame. Fortunately, there now appears to be a ceasefire; I hope it holds.

The current conflict raises a difficult question: when do regions have the right to secede from their parent country? It is ironic that Russia supports two breakaway regions in Georgia, while brutally suppressing such regions within their own borders, most notably Chechnya. In defending their actions in Chechnya, Russia pointed out that the US used force to prevent the secession of several states, including another Georgia, during the US Civil War. While those states failed then, some of those same states, along with those on the other side, successfully seceded from the British Empire some fourscore and several years earlier. There are many other secessionist movements around the world. The country of Georgia, itself, seceded from the Soviet Union in 1991, and had previously seceded, in 1918, from Bolshevik Russia, before being reconquered in 1921. The usual resolution of these issues is by force.

I believe in the concept of self-determination. People should be free to democratically choose to be part of whichever government they want. If the parent country wants to keep a region (and they usually d0) then it should use persuasion, other than the threat of force, to make it worthwhile to stay together. This would encourage the parent government to settle outstanding grievances. If that fails, then they should go their separate ways, peacefully.

I mentioned the US Civil War. Would I apply the same principle there? Sure. I would oppose using force to prevent states from seceding from the Union, if that was the will of the people in those states, even though I personally am in favor of maintaining the integrity of the Union. However, there is one difference with the states of the Confederacy: nobody asked the slaves. A large part of the populations of those states, a majority in some, even, were deprived of their rights, and not allowed to participate in the democratic process, just as under apartheid, only worse. However, although democracy was instituted after the war, its practice was brief and not enforced by the national government again until a century later.

One disturbing aspect of secessionist movements is that they tend to be driven by ethnicity. People often want to associate with those with whom they share linguistic, religious and racial/tribal affiliations. Unfortunately, most places are not ethnically homogeneous; different groups live to different extents intermixed with each other, so that if an ethnic enclave secedes, it has smaller ethnic enclaves within it. This is what has repeatedly led to ethnic cleansing and other evils. However, in a society of equal rights and secular rule of law, it does not matter so much who your neighbors are. What difference does it make whether I live under this government or that one, if they are the same, and leave me alone? It also helps if there is devolved local authority, rather than strictly centralized control. The more liberal and democratic a country becomes, the weaker secessionist movements seem to be.

Mars Landing

2008-05-29T14:28:00.000-07:00

I watched the Phoenix landing on Mars live the other day, right before I had to leave for work. Amazing! What's even more amazing is that another spacecraft, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, actually took a picture of Phoenix descending on a parachute.

Gay Marriage

2008-05-15T19:44:00.000-07:00

The California Supreme Court today did the right thing and declared the ban on gay marriage unconstitutional, because it deprives citizens of the right to equal protection under the law. This is not "legislating from the bench", it's protecting constitutional rights. A majority vote cannot violate basic civil rights. It's too bad it's my night off, so I don't get to see the Castro celebrating in the warm weather. (98 degrees today at my house!)

Politics

2008-04-26T04:29:00.000-07:00

I am an independent, or "decline to state" voter. I have voted for various parties in the past, but am satisfied with none of them. Although I have occasionally voted for Republicans in the past, in the current state of affairs I cannot in good conscience vote for any now, even if I liked the individual, because the Republican party as a whole has become disastrous. Like many, I am forced to vote Democrat just to try to counter the GOP, not because I entirely agree with that party. The issues I believe in are civil liberties, separation of church and state, nonintervention, multilateral relations, environmentalism, education, scientific research, and probably others I'm not thinking of now. I guess that you could call me a liberal.

More specifically, I despise Bush and his cronies, and what they have done to this country and the rest of the world. I opposed the invasion of Iraq, and was disappointed that spineless Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, voted for it, and am disgusted that McCain supports continuing the occupation. I am not enamored with any of the candidates, but I will vote for whichever one the Democrats put up. I think that the Republicans need to be removed from power at every level and in every department, to be kept out of control of the legislature and eventually replaced in the Supreme Court. The Democrats may not be all that great, but they're far better than the Neocons and theocrats in the Republican party.

Religion

2008-04-25T00:57:00.000-07:00

As you might be able to tell from the scarlet letter A, I label myself an atheist these days. It's not that I'm against everything about religion, it's just that I do not believe in supernatural beings. I was raised religious, but over the years have become increasingly convinced that beliefs in invisible spirits based upon texts written by primitive peoples have no basis in reality. I recognize that religious individuals and organizations do a lot of good things, but they also do a lot of bad things, and the good that they do does not require belief in any god. So, from time to time I will comment about some of the silliness, like the new creationist movie called Expelled.