You were born when? The French Revolutionary Calendar
blogs.bl.uk
blogs.bl.uk
Much like the metric system, the structure of the new calendar was quite simple and elegant. Naturally, once the Reign of Terror came into full swing, the creators of the Republican calendar were executed along with anyone else who was insufficiently zealous. Today, the only people who use it are students of the French Revolution who have to decipher all these crazy dates.
The revolutionary calendar was partially reverted to the older Gregorian calendar with effect from 1802 (several years after the Reign of Terror) and fully abolished by Napoleon in 1806 [2]. He had become Emperor of the French and wanted to replace the vestiges of the Republic that had installed the calendar in the first place.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar
Hmm... according to my own implementation of the calendar[0] we are actually 30 Messidor, an 225. Same according to the Android app I use on my phone. Do you have a link to the source of Emacs' implementation?
[0] https://github.com/seeschloss/floreal and a graphical calendar here: http://ssz.fr/republique/
Edit thinking about it, many implementations do not really go beyond 1806 and do not count leap years (année sextiles which have six extra days instead of five) after then (as before this date, leap years were supposed to be calculated from the actual sun movements instead of regularly spaced). This might be the reason for the change.
This page explains the inconsistencies. Apparently there are several ways to calculate the dates past 1806.
Also, while it was never really formalised, the Paris Commune in 1871 (year LXXIX) actually confirmed in an indirect way the Romme method of calculating leap years (every four years, except every 100 years, except every 400 years) by shortly using the Republican calendar.
I have a hard time understanding this language though https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-54/emacs/lis... so I'm not sure where it goes wrong (or right).
Was it not the document used when whatever problem that John had occurred, and this document is just here to show an example of the alternative calendar?
I depends a lot on the documents. A lot of historical French documents only have the Republican date written. Even at the time anyway, it would not have been difficult to find the corresponding Gregorian date, even in England probably.
It also has the added benefit of celebrating an event most modern people probably can relate to and are in favour of (the bloody struggle and oppressive regime that came afterwards admittedly not so much though ...) instead of the arbitrarily fixed year of birth of a religious figure many people are more or less indifferent about.
On a side note, PHP interestingly has had native support for the Revolutionary Calendar for a long time: http://php.net/manual/en/function.jdtofrench.php
> benefit of celebrating an event most modern people probably can relate to and are in favour of
I think more people care more /know more about Christmas than the French Revolution.
http://dozenalsociety.org.uk/pdfs/aitken.pdf
Of course, YMMV.
The most obvious problem is the definitions and "values" of the base units. The (current) defintions involve such nice round numbers like 299792458, 9192631770, 273.16, and so on. I can appreciate that nature might not allow aligning all the units in a perfectly harmoniuous matter, but surely we can do better than this.
Then there is of course the big kilogram debacle that we are still trying to figure out. In addition to the fact that it is defined via an artifact, it also is the only base unit with a prefix, mostly by accident.
While everything else in metric system is mostly nicely aligned with decimal system, the attempt to reform time failed, so we are stuck there with the legacy unit(s). I would had preferred to have the time base unit to be (roughly) 1/1000th of a day rather than 1/86400th of day. Admittedly basing time on earth rotation lacks certain degree of universality that other base units have, so maybe altogether different base would have been a good idea.
These days metric system is associated mostly with 10^(n*3) prefixes, but that is relatively new feature. That is something I would have liked to have from day 1 so that we wouldn't have a cacophony of centimeters and deciliters in common use.
Oh, and mentioning liters gets us to the confusing world of area and volume units. Originally metric system had a(c)res and liters, but then they noticed that they are not that great and switched to square and cubic meters. Except of course people didn't follow and I think in pretty much every metric country at least liters are still in common use.
It might have been a good idea to retain those specialized units, because of the ambiguity problems of prefixed sq/cu meters. At least personally I think it would be more convenient (if maybe not as elegant) that mm³ would be 10^-3 cubic meters instead of the current 10^-9 cubic meters. Now if we are sticking to the "main" prefixes, we don't have anything between mm³ (which is tiny amount) and m³ (which is large amount).
From a purely notational perspective, it would have been nice to have bit more consistency with the naming and symbols of the units and prefixes. Some of the units are named after people, some are not, so some of them have capital letter as symbol, others a lower-case. And to mix things up, some units (even base units) have two or three letter symbols. Of course ohms are the special snowflake that deserve a greek letter.
Prefixes mostly follow the rule that capitals are >0 and lowercases <0. Thats nice, except kilo strikes again as an exception. And again a greek letter sneaked in just to make sure that typesetting units remains a challenge. How many times have you seen µ substituted with a u?
I probably could go on, but yeah, it sure is not perfect system.