For 12 years of the revolutionary era, France did use decimal time. And the calendar and clocks were organized around a 10 day week and a 10 hour day. But those changes, coupled with the loss of Sunday worship, had other effects on the population.
Here’s an assessment of what was really meant and then lost by the elimination of Sunday:
“‘The elderly ladies took advantage of the long journey (to church) to exchange old stories with other old gossips … they met friends and relatives on the way, or when they reached the county town, whom they enjoyed seeing … there then followed a meal or perhaps a reciprocal invitation, which led to one relative or another….’ But if that was the way it was for the old ladies, what did Sunday mean to ‘young girls, whose blood throbbed with the sweetest desire of nature!’ We can well understand their impatience, ‘they waited for each other at the start of the road they shared,’ they danced.
“Now, however, when the Tenth Day came around, ‘the men were left to the devices they always had:’ the old men went to the tavern, and they bargained. The young men drank and, deprived of their ‘lovely village girls’, they quarrelled. As for the women, they had nothing left to do in village. The mothers were miserable in their little hamlets, the daughters too, and out of this came their need to gather together in crowds. If the need for recreation is necessary because of moral forces… there is absolutely no doubt that village girls find it very hard to bear privations which are likely to prolong their unmarried state: ‘in all regions the pleasure of love is the greatest pleasure.'”
– from The Revolution Against the Church, From Reason to the Supreme Being, by Michel Vovelle, pp 158-159.
I know the real goal of the republican calendar was to undermine the Church's power by making it so Sundays would fall at random days of the week, and also screw over the workers by leaving them with a worse weekend-to-week ratio.
However, all I ever read about this part of the revolution seems to indicate that people just didn't comply and went to church anyway on Sundays, and also didn't work that day. On that account, I feel likr your quote is kind of partisan. People wouldn't have been left lost and aimlessly drinking on their tenth day because of a lack of God, because they never quit going to church!
Not sure I understand what you mean. At least, I thought that (most? all?) the churches were closed for the worst part of the French Revolution aftermath.
For example, the new state transformed Notre Dame and other Catholic churches into Temples of Reason, from which the new state religion, the Cult of Reason, would be celebrated. It didn't last long. Hard to create a new religion quickly. Maybe some echoes of recent history there.
It was much more nuanced than that, and the vast majority of the French people stayed Christian during the period. Also, keep in mind the revolution was mostly a Paris thing, the rest of the country was left relatively unaffected at first.
Pretty sure it mattered when and where you were. Armies and militias were sent to put down defiant regions who had set up their own armies and militias in order to keep the Revolution out.
We could have all of our Martian colonists adhere to an Earth day of 24 hours, with sunrise and sunset drifting around the clock, or we could have them observe an extra 25th hour of the day that lasts 36 minutes.
Or, we could define the Martian day as 24 Martian hours of 60 Martian minutes of 61.5 seconds, with seconds the invariant interchange time between planets.
In turn, seconds stop being a unit of human timekeeping, and everyone just uses decimal minutes as the final subdivision.
As I habitually mention when the revolutionary calendar comes up, emacs calendar mode will give you the date with p-f. For what it's worth, today is Quartidi 4 Prairial an 233 de la Révolution, jour de l'Angélique. (Prairial I had heard of, jour de l'Angélique is news to me.)
Their seconds must have been about 864ms though, otherwise they day is more than 3 hours too long which would be very annoying for any kind of scheduling I’d imagine.
It also messes up the original proposal for defining the meter, which predated the revolution and was "the length of a pendulum with a period of 2 seconds" (i.e. the pendulum would be at its lowest point once per second). Which is ironic considering that the meter was also adopted during the revolution, though with a definition not based on the length of a pendulum).
Latitude, mass concentrations, and climate also messed with the half-period/metre ("seconds pendulum") definition; with increasing frequency precision, one would need an almanac, an accelerometer, and probably other tools. Additionally, stabilizing the length of the pendulum under environmental conditions was already known to be tricky, with materials science unable to produce reasonably low thermal-expansion rods prior to the 20th century.
Consequently, the seconds-pendulum/metre relationship gets in the way as one might want to go to sub-millimetre length precision for parts made in different locations or at different times of the day or year. Precision copies of a prototype was more reliable in practice.
(In practice we mostly still generate precise and accurate physical artifacts and make copies from those, it's just that there one can in principle generate such an artifact just about anywhere and anywhen, calibrating with (for example) interferometry <https://iopscience.iop.org/book/edit/978-0-7503-1578-4/chapt...>)
Finally, the Trinity Clock <https://clock.trin.cam.ac.uk/main.php?menu_option=theory> is a neat examination of a well known pendulum clock that's surprisingly accurate (if not really precise; it's been reliably accurate to within two seconds over the course of a month for a very long time, but it's not going to give you a 10MHz sine-wave, and it's not a good for disciplining an oscillator which does so). Do check out the various plots.
Sure but using a physical pendulum as a frequency standard is unreliable; an unreliable frequency standard is a bad basis for any sort of time-of-travel definition of length.
Many difficulties of using pendulum clocks (and in transporting any sort of chronometer) in real circumstances were also known before the revolution, with French clockmakers competing for the prize money in Britain's Longitude Act 1714 (13 Ann. c. 14) and the ancien regime's various prize offers in the 1740-1770s.
Prior to Harrison's marine chronometers, minimum longitude errors introduced in multi-degree changes of latitudes were indeed on the order of 10% across an oceanic part of a great circle or other more favourable route under cloudy conditions, and sufficient that in the early 18th century it was common for ships to navigate by dead reckoning along a single line of latitude -- a boon to pirates and other enemies, and also often adding many days to the travel time, in an effort to avoid the common problem (eg. HMS Centurion, 1741) of not knowing whether one was west or east of a landmark at a known latitude.
Prominent pre-revolutionary figures also disliked the idea of relying on chronometry for position/length/angle measurements generally -- most notably the excellent geometer and astronomer Pierre Bouguer (after whom the relevant <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouguer_anomaly> is named) -- so it's not as if messing up a seconds-pendulum-based definition of a metre (and its consequences for the neat pole-to-equator 1/4 great circle length or mass of a cm^3 of water at STP, both of which now are just approximately round numbers) would have been universally outrageous.
And anyway surely one could consider a solution in which the half-period of the metre pendulum might not be exactly one decimal second. After all, at the time in practice one had to measure across many swings to obtain the effective length with reasonable precision. And Earth's rotation was known to be unstable (Richer, Newton, Maupertuis).
Another "fun fact" somewhat more relevant to the article is the gradient (aka. grad, or gon), it is a unit of angle equal to 1/400 of a turn, slightly smaller than a degree.
It goes well with the metre because 1 km is 1/100 grad of latitude on earth. It mirrors the nautical mile in that 1 nautical mile is 1/60 degree (1 arcminute) of latitude on earth.
The grad is almost never used on a day to day basis, even in France. It is still used in specialized fields, like surveying.
I believe it was one out of three possible options (other than degrees and radians) to represent angles on my high school scientific calculator.
Accidentally staying in "grad" mode when cycling through them (DEG -> RAD -> GRAD) was always a concern, especially since the difference between RAD and GRAD was easy to miss on the small LCD display (the indicator was via partial selection of the letters within a mask spelling "DEGRAD").
Ah, this brings back fond memories of Swatch's attempt [1] at a decimal division of the day at the height of the dotcom boom.
I still must have one of these digital wristwatches in some box in a closet, with a big button that starts a glorious monochrome LCD animation of "going online" (while of course the watch stayed as offline as any other Quartz watch).
The thought of a watch that could actually go online seemed ridiculously utopian back then, even when everybody was otherwise dreaming of cyberspace. But only a few weeks ago, in a moment of closure spanning a quarter of a century, I finally downloaded a "Swatch Internet Time" complication – from the Internet, directly onto my wristwatch.
No but they had a clean year of 12 months, 30 days each (3 ten-day weeks) plus 5/6 holiday days at the end of the calendar (around the September equinox).
Also, the months were given names by a Poet, and the days had minerals, vertues or plants instead of Saints. The calendar itself was pretty cool.
Honestly, if they had 5 weeks of 6 days each instead of the 3 weeks of 10 days, I'd even call it the perfect calendar.
Better would be an even more fundamental change: instead of trying to standardize everything on base 10, recognize that base 8 or 16 is much more convenient in both computing and everyday life, and standardize around that.
Base-60 for everyday life would be nuts; you really think it would be more convenient to have 60 independent digit symbols?
There's an argument for 12 for sure, but I still think having a power of 2 would be more beneficial than having the extra factors. 8 would give you the same number of integer factors as 10, plus all the benefits of being a power of 2.
"In humans, the infrared contact lenses enabled participants to accurately detect flashing morse code-like signals and to perceive the direction of incoming infrared light."
Not what I expected from the title but interesting and also I wonder what would be the applications.
Hey thanks (I'm the author)! BTW the "Pro" version has the electrochromic dimming, so I recommend paying a little extra for that unless you're really sure you're not going to need it.
EDIT: To clarify, I meant the "Xreal Air 2 Pro", not the "Xreal One Pro". The latter are much more expensive.
They are $299 on sale on the vendor website right now. I won't link because I don't want to promote them necessarily, but I think you must have seen a different vendor or something?
I've been thinking about using xreal glasses for coding but all the reviews I've seen seems to think that the fidelity isn't good enough for reading text for lengthy stretches of time. This article is the first counter argument here.
I don't get why people still use postman when you have nice open-source tools such as Bruno [0], which actually can do a lot of what postman does, and more than that you can even import your postman collections.
Thank you so much for sharing this. We're actively looking for alternatives to Postman right now, and would be heavily inclined toward an OSS solution.
I'm officially a Hurl user - really awesome work! Captures + asserts is exactly how I want to be thinking about API testing. Also, the VSCode extensions for syntax highlighting a .hurl file, and the "Hurl runner" so I can click a button to run a test, are pretty much all the GUI I need.
