Talk:Decimal time

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Here's the "pandecimal" section, which I couldn't find a reference to even on Google. Some of this has a source (included), but other parts seem very "inside baseball" and more like minutiae of interest only to Dorian Aescher fans. Who's Dorian Aescher anyway?! --Dablaze 07:43, Aug 14, 2004 (UTC)

Archived text of Pandecimal system

Archive of discussion with 81.225.211.117/Metric Time/Metrische Zeit

Contents

[edit] A modest proposal

I was just stumbling over this talk page on recent changes and remembering all the fun we had with Mr. Metric Time, and I realized that this page is a total mess and utterly confusing to anyone who has not been there during the discussions. Now that Mr Voorman has left (for good, hopefully :P) and won't be clearing the page anymore, would it be appropriate to at least sort the old discussions chronologically? I know that editing other people's comments on talk pages is a big no-no, that's why I don't just go ahead and do it, but i think that sorting the discussions might really benefit this page. -- Ferkelparade π 00:21, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I think refactoring would be fine, as long as you dont lose content or context: in fact, your right in saying we would get more context if you refactored. I would do it myself, only I still shuder whenever these pages appear on my watchlist, and so I dont think I can be sufficently neutral! Iain 08:37, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

A Google search reveals that Dorian Aescher is famous as "a member from the Decimal Time forum." There seems to be nothing published by him anywhere else. Since the odds that there are two Dorian Aescher in the decimal time community are slim, to put it mildly, it's likely that that is indeed the Aescher, and that everything posted about him here has been posted by said member of the "Decimal Time forum" himself. 213.112.5.132 11:30, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I have not posted anything here, however someone I know has taken the liberty of doing so, without my permission. I contacted Wikipedia a year ago to have this copyright protected material removed. (as you can see below) My work is Not to be posted anywhere on this site. furtherfore, neither my name nor personal information is to be posted on this site. One sentence, in apparent violation of WP:NLT, has been removed here. The IP who posted it is welcome to replace this annotation with any clearer statement that is consistent with that policy. In that case, they should add "~~~ 02:10, 30 January 2006 & ~~~~~" in place of the "unsigned" notation at the end of this paragraph, to properly document both of their edits. Thank You! D.A. 30 January 2006. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.225.195.17 (talk • contribs) 02:10, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

The IP user User:81.225.195.17, in the same 02:10, 30 January 2006 edit, has also created a forged post by modifying the post preceding it without removing the valid signature on it. The alterations were
  1. reducing the first occurence of Dorian Aescher to D. A.;
  2. removing the second occurence of Dorian Aescher; and
  3. removing the words
    that that is indeed the Aescher
The unforged version has been restored.
--Jerzy•t 16:14, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
_ _ WP is exceedingly unusual among non-commercial Web sites in our scrupulous approach to violations of the exclusive rights of authors under applicable copyright law. On the other hand User:81.225.195.17's expectation of being permitted to remove references to a name, or of inducing others to make such removals, is not only unsupported by our copyright policies, but also in direct conflict with our policy of preserving past discussion and its context, to the full extent that is compatible with avoiding copyvios.
_ _ (Colleagues inclined to send flowers in recognition of my refraining from explicit characterization of the IP's request should instead contribute to the WM foundation in my name. Thank you.)
--Jerzy•t 16:14, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Rewrite

A short note -- the mention of Microsoft Excel time equivalent was removed because, in this person's opinion, an encyclopedia should not be making reference to proprietary numerical systems that could change and render the page inaccurate.

Welcome to Wikipedia. This is a wiki, not printed paper volumes that are updated once a decade. Wikipedia changes every second of every day, and there are many pages devoted to proprietary systems. There is a whole article already on Microsoft Excel, for instance. (Not that Excel's serial dates have changed much since they copied them from Lotus 1-2-3 two decades ago, anyway.) Please see Wikipedia Policies and guidelines for information about what is appropriate.
Also, it's better to add notes to the bottom of the page, not to the middle, under an unrelated section heading. And the guidelines also recommend signing your notes with the meta tag ~~~~, which inserts your name and date/time, rather than posting anonymously; otherwise, it appears to part of the following comments, which were posted by someone else last year. While I'm at it, it's also recommended that you register a username. -- Nike 01:13, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

How about rewriting the article, itself? There's a number of issues with it, such as misstatements of fact, like "Decimal time remained in tentative use in France until the official introduction of the metric system (or Système International d'Unités [SI]) on April 7, 1795." (SI was not introduced until 1954, and is only the latest version of the metric system, differing significantly from the 1795 version.) The "Sekants time" referred to has no source, and is simply one of many vanity decimal time systems. And I have no clue what either "serial time" or "integer time" are, except that they resemble, but not exactly, Unix time. (sic) These seem to be simply neologisms.

And "metric time" is simply the base unit of time interval (the second) as defined by the modern metric system (along with multiples and submultiples, like the millisecond) in spite of all the funky clocks individuals have made with that name. And since I see that there is also an article named Metric time, it probably also could use a rewrite, to distguish it from decimal time. (Most of that article seems to have little to do with the metric system, and should probably be moved to this article.)

I don't know which "decimal time advocates" are being referred to, but there does not seem to be an organized movement with stated goals. Decimal time is already used by astronomers, in the form of decimal fractions of the day (such as 2000 Jan. 1.5, where .5 represents noon) but this is only barely mentioned. More could also be said of French decimal time, and nothing has been said of ancient Egyptian and Chinese forms of decimal time. There are also other important applications of decimal time not mentioned, such as in computer programs like Microsoft Excel.

After all that, I guess I should volunteer, if nobody else wants to. -- Nike 06:12, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I moved everything around, removed some irrelevant stuff and added material, including references. Since the article on metric time was similar to this one, they should either be distinct or merged, so I wrote this article to focus on decimal time as it is usually defined, that is, as time of day, and metric time refers specifically to units of measuring time interval defined using metric rules. I tried to make the two articles complementary, instead of contradictary. -- Nike 11:54, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I have refactored the talk page, so that all comments are in chronological order. -- Nike 07:15, 25 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Copyright

It has come to my attention that my copyright protected material was posted here without my permission, it seems that someone had copied the material directly from the Decimal Time site. This material, which includes the Pandecimal System and Sekants Time is not to be posted here. Aescher 17:10, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC) This simulated 4-tilde signature accurately reflects the editor's registered login, but the accurate UTC time of the edit that placed the time-stamp was 16:12, and they added minor changes to the 'graph at 16:19 and 16:28. - - - - At 02:11, 30 January 2006 (UTC), User:81.225.195.17 replaced (twice within this section including in this 'graph) an accurate piped lk to this contribution's editor's user page, with User:D.A., thereby referencing the potential user page of an account that has never been used to contribute. The accurate user lk has been restored.

Feel free to remove any material you know to be copyrighted and report it at Wikipedia:Copyrights. We try to remove copyrighted material here as soon as possible in order to adhere to the GNU Free Documentation License, so rest assured that your material will not be permitted to be used here if you can pick out what here is rightfully yours. — Ливай | ☺ 05:06, 20 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Thank you Ливай, I believe all proprietary material has been removed now.
I am very grateful for your assurance. ~ best regards,
D.Aescher Aescher 10:41, 20 Apr 2005 (UTCThis link accurately reflects the editor's registered login, but the accurate UTC time of the edit that placed the time-stamp was 16:12, and they added a minor change to the 'graph at 9:47. - - - - At 02:11, 30 January 2006 (UTC), User:81.225.195.17 replaced (twice within this section including in this 'graph) an accurate piped lk to this contribution's editor's user page, with User:D.A., thereby referencing the potential user page of an account that has never been used to contribute. The accurate user lk has been restored.
Livajo has been a bit imprecise, in a way that seldom matters. By "free to remove any material you know to be copyrighted" they mean to exclude, for instance, things that Aescher hold the copyright on, and that he edited onto WP himself -- for instance, everything on this page that bears his sig. In those cases, there is a copyright but no possibility of a copyvio, bcz in including it in a WP edit, Aescher placed it under GFDL; as such his copyright on it is still in effect (which is apparently crucial to the legal theory behind WP's use of GFDL), but that copyright has been gutted of the availability to assert almost all the exclusive rights that come with a copyright. Technically, Aescher has no more nor less right to remove it than anyone else, but where it is part of a discussion thread that others have responded to he has no practical right to do so. Anyone has the legal right to put it back, and will normally have the support of the rest of the community in doing so, since removing it destroys the context others were comment within, and thus changes the meaning of what they said in response. Aescher's desire to remove or alter something he said ends up being one guy against a multitude. Which is why i put it all back: i know it's worth the effort, even if he hasn't figured out that it's not worth his efforts to try to keep it out.
--Jerzy•t 01:30, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

FWIW, the user formerly known as Aescher claims that he did not post the material in question, in spite of the fact that the poster was on the same IP subnet. Rather, he says that someone he knows must have done it without his knowledge or permission. The original author did not use his name, and as I recall denied being Mr. Aescher. Given the information, I think we must assume that the copyright really was violated, although that does not justify all of the edits. --Nike 14:05, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

_ _ Sorry if i was unclear. My assumption so far is that (despite someone's early statement to the contrary) the claim about our article having infringed is accurate. In contrast to that, the IP claiming to be Aescher seeks removal of information added, outside the main namspace, in other WP edits signed in some cases by User:Aescher and in others by that IP, which were made under GFDL by their authors. These edits were clearly written with the purpose of posting them (under GDFL) on WP, so any claim that they were posted by someone other than their author would be so contrived as to lack credibility. The claims of a legal right to remove information from them, e.g. to reduce the name to cryptic initials, could thus have nothing to do with copyright (even if you could copyright you own name or prevent the paraphrasing of the ideas that you wrote). I was contesting that claim for removal, and not the copy-vio treatment of the removed main namespace material.
--Jerzy•t 01:51, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Revolutionary Time

I see the problem. I had assumed that the existing text had quoted the correct decree for decimal time. In fact, as the first reference will show, the quoted paragraph is from the decree of 5 October 1793, which also established the Revolutionary Calendar - although without names, in the Quaker manner. Read your source, before claiming inaccuracy.

Indeed [1] the external link correctly says:

French decimal time was first declared by the decree of October 5, 1793, which was modified by the addition of the underlined words in the decree of November 24, 1793.

Reading the text, there or here would have shown that the modification consisted of naming the fractions of the day.

The claim that the Revolutionary calendar is based upon Egyptian usage is both unsourced and implausible. If any ancient parallel affected the decision, the Greek division of the lunar month (29 or 30 days) into three decades is preferable, if still unlikely and speculative. Septentrionalis 18:14, 15 May 2005 (UTC)

Source: report by Gilbert Romme on the Era of the Republic, September 10, 1793, [2]
As for the decrees, the previous version was correct, and yours is wrong. You see, the external link you refer to is my own web page, so I am quite familiar with what it says, since I wrote it. The October decree did introduce the concept of decimal time, but the November decree included the entire text, including the units of the decimal hour, minute and second. According to your misquote, the October decree introduced decimal hours, but this was added by the November decree, as a careful reading of my web page, and the original decrees, make clear. --Nike 23:51, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
This is very strange; you misdescribe your own site. The section XI was cut and pasted from the decree of 5 Octobre 1793, as you scanned it. I can understand relying on one's memory of one's own website, but please look at it again. Would it help if I cited a printed edition?
Paragraph XI of the decree of 5 October is:
XI. Le jour, de minuit à minuit, est divisé en dix parties; chaque partie en dix autres, ainsi de suite jusqu'à la plus petite portion commensurable de la durée. Cet article ne sera de rigueur pour les actes publics qu'à compter du 1er du premier mois de la troisième année de la république.
Paragraph XI of the decree of 4 Frimaire is:
XI. Le jour, de minuit à minuit, est divisé en dix parties ou heures, chaque partie en dix autres, ainsi de suite jusqu’à la plus petite portion commensurable de la durée. La centième partie de l'heure est appelée minute décimale; la centième partie de la minute est appelée seconde décimale. Cet article ne sera de rigueur pour les actes publics, qu'à compter du 1er Vendémiaire, l'an trois de la République (I have not bothered to preserve italics.)Septentrionalis 01:03, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Funny how you quote it correctly here, and yet incorrectly in the article. I did not rely on my memory, but read the actual web page. The section on my site is from the November decree, not the October one; I underlined the text which did not occur in the first decree (I could also have underlined the text which did occur) but you missed some of it. The October decree did not include the words ou heures. My web page makes this clear. The November (Frimaire) decree not only adds the second sentence, but changes the first. It is the Frimaire decree which established decimal time as it was (briefly) implemented, with decimal hours, minutes and seconds. The second decree was made ten months before the first even would have come into effect, and thus was the one which actually did.
BTW, SI also recognizes a standard day defined as being exactly 86400 SI seconds. Of course, there are other definitions of the standard second and day, but if you're going to insist on the SI second, then you should use the SI day. (I can provide references, if you doubt me.) The term "standard" here was meant to refer to the looser definition of a second as 1/86400 day, since the use of "standard time" predates SI. This could be the mean solar second, which is defined as 1/86400 mean solar day, or the ET second, which was defined as 1/86400 the mean solar day in 1900, etc. Perhaps another term could be used instead of "standard second" (Babylonian? sexigesimal?) but I think that this is preferable to "true second", "true hour", etc. This implies that decimal units are false. "True time" actually refers to apparent solar time as measured by local motion of the relative sun, which is not dependent on sexigesimal (standard) time units. --Nike 04:14, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Agreed. Septentrionalis 16:22, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Documentation of History Merge (2005 Sept)

Merging of a minor fraction of the content of Decimalization of time of day was accomplished earlier this month by copy and paste, with the history being overwritten with a rdr instead of merging it. I am performing the belated history merge, and recording here which edits were made under the name that has been turned into a rdr.

Since the history of Decimal time runs close to 200 entries, and the four entries of Decimalization of time of day's have only the merging edit of Decimal time interposing itself between any two of them, there is no benefit to copying here the whole pre-merge history of the older & non-rdr'd article.

Note Well: The undelete portion of the delete-move-undelete sequence apparently takes some time to be effective; until then the self redirect will be the most recent version available. A reversion to the 15 September 2005 revision may be necessary when it again becomes available.

OK, there it is; reverting momentarily.
--Jerzy•t 18:47, 17 September 2005 (UTC)--

[edit] Portion of Decimal time's History that includes the Period when Decimalization of time of day was an Article and when Histories were Merged

  • 20:14, 15 September 2005 Jitse Niesen m (→Decimal time and speed - grammar)
  • 09:50, 14 September 2005 Patrick (→Conversions - merge in Decimalization of time of day)
  • 00:28, 12 August 2005 Nike m (rv changes by 12.18.96.89 to last version by 86.131.2.56)
  • 22:59, 8 August 2005 12.18.96.89 (→Fractional days)
  • 22:46, 8 August 2005 86.131.2.56 (→Conversions - link heart rate)
  • 20:56, 8 August 2005 84.159.228.175 (equivilent->equivalent)

[edit] History of Decimalization of time of day Prior to History Merge

  • 09:52, 14 September 2005 Patrick (#redirect Decimal time (merged))
  • 23:27, 13 September 2005 MadMax m
  • 23:25, 13 September 2005 MadMax m
  • 20:26, 11 September 2005 Jerzy (stub; hopefully there's more worth saying, perhaps notable formal proposals)

[edit] Merged Portion of History for Corresponding Period

The four italicized entries were made under the title Decimalization of time of day

  • 20:14, 15 September 2005 Jitse Niesen m (→Decimal time and speed - grammar)
  • 09:52, 14 September 2005 Patrick (#redirect Decimal time (merged))
  • 09:50, 14 September 2005 Patrick (→Conversions - merge in Decimalization of time of day)
  • 23:27, 13 September 2005 MadMax m
  • 23:25, 13 September 2005 MadMax m
  • 00:28, 12 August 2005 Nike m (rv changes by 12.18.96.89 to last version by 86.131.2.56)
  • 20:26, 11 September 2005 Jerzy (stub; hopefully there's more worth saying, perhaps notable formal proposals)
  • 22:59, 8 August 2005 12.18.96.89 (→Fractional days)
  • 22:46, 8 August 2005 86.131.2.56 (→Conversions - link heart rate)
  • 20:56, 8 August 2005 84.159.228.175 (equivilent->equivalent)

[edit] Stop the decimal insanity

This obsession to convert everything to decimal is misguided. Decimal is an arbitrary and not very useful number base. The time system as it exists is much more useful than decimal, because it's easy to divide minutes or hours into into 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 parts, or to divide days into 2, 3, 4 or 6 parts. With decimal you're limited to dividing your time periods evenly by 2, 5, and maybe 4.

We should change our number base, rather than our time system. See the Duodecimal, or "dozenal" system.

What does any of this have to do with the article? As it says on the Wikipedia:Talk page:
Wikipedians generally oppose the use of talk pages just for the purpose of partisan talk about the main subject. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, it's an encyclopedia. In other words, talk about the article, not about the subject.
There are other places online to attack the decimal system. If you want to post here, how about telling us specifically what you would change about the article? Also, you should sign your posts, so we know who is saying what and when; just type four tildes (~~~~) at the end of your message. --Nike 05:48, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
Well, the history page says it was 198.107.49.206 - of course maybe this is not the point. --gwc 04:48, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

It's a simple matter of Wikipedia etiquette. We shouldn't have to go to the history page to figure out who said what. Also, signatures let us know where one person's comments end and another's begins. Imagine if nobody bothered; you would have to check the history for every single comment, and would probably get confused about who actually said what. But I shouldn't need to explain that here: it's the policy across Wikipedia. --Nike 12:15, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ancient Egypt

Decimal time was said to have been introduced in Ancient Egypt

Was said by whom? Do you have any sources? MvR 16:26, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't know where that came from. Maybe there is a conflation with the Republican system, since the French Revolutionary calendar was explicitly said to be based upon the Egyptian calendar.[3] However, the French noted that Egypt had a 24-hour day. I asked someone who has repeatedly made this claim for sources, and he had none. --Nike 07:01, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Timezone of FRT

How was the zero point of French Revolutionary Time determined? Was it based on:

  • GMT plus one standard hour
  • GMT plus some round figure in decimal hours
  • Paris Mean Time
  • the mean solar time at the locality where it was used
  • something else entirely?

Moreover, did they ever try to share their idea with the world? And if so, did they intend other parts of the world to adapt it into their own local time, or to follow their time in the style of Swatch Internet Time, or what? -- Smjg 15:23, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

To answer the first question, decimal time followed the same practice as duodecimal time, which was then true solar time, not mean solar time. GMT was not yet standard then even in England, and the French later used temps moyen de Paris until 1911, and never did use GMT by name even to this day, so they certainly would not have used Greenwich time in 1793. Thus, in Paris they would have used temps vrai de Paris, and elsewhere temps vrai that is, true or apparent time, for that location, as might be observed on a sun dial. At the time, people adjusted their clocks and watches daily according to the sun, since the devices were not that precise anyway. And in decimal time, there was no "zero" hour, but l'heure dix, hour 10. Documents of the period state that the first day of the Republican Calendar, of which decimal time was a part, was determined according to when the autumnal equinox was observed at the Paris Observatory in temps vrai.

Regarding the second question, the calendar was imposed throughout the Empire, in Europe and overseas, but decimal time was little used even in France. They certainly tried to get scientists in other countries involved with their whole new system of decimal measures, but this was hampered by the fact that they were often at war with these same countries. The rejection of decimal time outside France is often given as a primary reason why it was abandoned. However, had it been used elsewhere, it would have been according to local solar time, since there was then no radio or even telegraph to synchronize time between cities. The concept of standard time and of time zones had not yet been implemented, and would not be for the better part of the next century. --Nike 21:58, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

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