Decimal time – Wikipedia

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Decimal time – Wikipedia

Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. This term is often used specifically to refer to the time system used in France for a few years beginning in 1792 during the French Revolution, which divided the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds (100000 decimal seconds per day), as opposed to the more familiar UTC time standard, which divides the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds (86400 SI seconds per day).

The main advantage of a decimal time system is that, since the base used to divide the time is the same as the one used to represent it, the whole time representation can be handled as a single string. Therefore, it becomes simpler to interpret a timestamp and to perform conversions. For instance, 1:23:45 is 1 decimal hour and 23 decimal minutes and 45 decimal seconds, or 1.2345 decimal hours, or 123.45 decimal minutes or 12345 decimal seconds; 3 hours is 300 minutes or 30,000 seconds. This property also makes it straightforward to represent a timestamp as a fractional day, so that 2021-04-18.54321 can be interpreted as five decimal hours and 43 decimal minutes and 21 decimal seconds after the start of that day, or a fraction of 0.54321 (54.321%) through that day (which is shortly after traditional 13:00). It also adjusts well to digital time representation using epochs, in that the internal time representation can be used directly both for computation and for user-facing display.

The proponents of the French Revolution were so smart. Why don't we use their time system?

The World Is Studded With Artificial Mountains – Atlas Obscura

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The World Is Studded With Artificial Mountains – Atlas Obscura

From atop the jagged mountain, cars, people, and houses appear as tiny versions of themselves, the noise of their day to day activity muted so high in the air. Scrubby vegetation grows from cracks in the rock, soaking up the sun and rustling in the slight breeze. Birds caw as they alight at the top of a slope, observing the expanse below them.

The mountain is just another part of the topography to those that live near it, but it is not a natural part of the landscape. The mountain is completely artificial, a colossus formed not by eons of geologic change but the vigor of industrial concrete production. Artificial mountains have sprung up all over the world, the result of hellish manufacturing processes, piled construction and mining waste, or in some cases built deliberately to add a humongous new feature to the horizon.

April 18, 2021 Morning

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Good morning! Happy Average High is 60 🌷! Three weeks to Mothers Day 👩‍ . Soon time to get the Frank Zappa record out 🎼 while looking at the tulips at Washington Park. Mostly cloudy with a few breaks of sun and 42 degrees in Delmar, NY. ⛅ Calm wind.

Today will be partly sunny 🌞, with a high of 59 degrees at 2pm. One degrees below normal, which is similar to a typical day around April 17th. Northwest wind 3 to 8 mph. A year ago, we had cloudy skies in the morning with more sun in the afternoon. The high last year was 49 degrees. The record high of 90 was set in 1976. 2.7 inches of snow fell back in 1887.❄

No big plans for today, but after I take my shower 🛀 I’m thinking of hiking down to Van Dyke Preserve and then back out to Five Rivers. 🐦 I also have some coding projects I’m working on, along with fixing a long-standing bug in the blog code that occasionally causes posts to appear too early or stick on the front page when they shouldn’t appear. Kind of the same thing I did yesterday, spending several hours looking at birds and wildlife at Five Rivers, although with the cold wet weather, there were fewer wildlife but I think I spotted a piebald deer 🦌 but he was gone before I could get a picture.

Solar noon 🌞 is at 12:55 pm with sun having an altitude of 58.3° from the due south horizon (-12.5° vs. 6/21). A six foot person will cast a 3.7 foot shadow today compared to 2.2 feet on the first day of summer. The golden hour 🏅 starts at 7:03 pm with the sun in the west (280°). 📸

The sunset is in the west-northwest (286°) with the sun dropping below the horizon at 7:41 pm after setting for 3 minutes with dusk around 8:10 pm, which is one minute and 9 seconds later than yesterday. 🌇 At dusk you’ll see the First Quarter 🌓 Moon in the west-southwest (243°) at an altitude of 61° from the horizon, 245,556 miles away. 🚀 The best time to look at the stars is after 8:46 pm. At sunset, look for partly cloudy skies 🌃 and temperatures around 53 degrees. There will be a west-northwest breeze at 5 mph. Today will have 13 hours and 32 minutes of daytime, an increase of 2 minutes and 44 seconds over yesterday.

Tonight will be partly cloudy 🌓, with a low of 39 degrees at 4am. Typical for tonight. West wind around 5 mph becoming calm after midnight. In 2020, we had clear skies in the evening, which became mostly clear by the early hours of the morning. It got down to 28 degrees. The record low of 18 occurred back in 1875.

Found another real long-standing bug on the blog. 🐞 For years, I’ve had issues with posts appearing too early and staying sticky on the blog. Turns out I was just missing the GMT date field on my blog, when creating new blog posts programmatically, Not sure how I missed that but I’ve been coding things incorrectly for years on the blog.

Been having more problems with my credit card. 💳 I went to buy milk yesterday, 🥛 and I was locked out of the card, with it declined at the retailer and I ended up paying cash. I got home and saw a few pending charges I did not make, so it looks like my card has been hacked again — only had the new card for a week and only so far bought milk with it and went to Walmart twice. I didn’t think it was that easy to hack the chip-on-cards as they use one-time tokens, and I haven’t swiped anywhere yet. Monitoring for other pending charges, but so far nothing. Hoping I won’t have to get yet another card. Need to get this figured out as I have to renew my cellphone/hotspot by Wednesday. Aggravating to say the least, especially as I don’t do much online shopping but I like the convenience of not having to have exact change.

Really hoping next week to get out of town. 🏕 It looks like by then the snow will be gone, and while Sunday is problematic, I think the weather will be a lot better for Saturday. 😎 Things could shift weather-wise, but I’m hopeful. Not sure if I will drive up north on Friday after my therapy session, or wait for Saturday morning early to head north and hike then camp. 🚘 Kind of would like to do two nights. It just seems like every weekend that I have free it turns out to be cloudy and rainy. And then we don’t end up getting much rain at all.

As previously noted, there are 3 weeks until Mothers Day 👩‍ when the sun will be setting at 8:04 pm with dusk at 8:36 pm. On that day in 2020, we had cold, partly sunny and temperatures between 45 and 33 degrees. Typically, the high temperature is 67 degrees. We hit a record high of 93 back in 1979.

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