Friday, January 23, 2009

French Revolutionary Time

A lot of you were having fun with Robespierre's (aka the Time Goblin*) support of "Decimal Time." Thought you'd like to see the conversions:

There are exactly 86,400 standard seconds in a standard day, but in the French decimal time system there are 100,000 decimal seconds in the day, so the decimal second is shorter than its counterpart.


Decimal to Standard:

-One decimal second is 86,400/100,000 = 0.864 standard seconds.
-One decimal minute is 1,440/1,000 = 1.44 standard minutes, or 1 standard minute and 26.4 standard seconds.
-One decimal hour is 24/10 = 2.4 standard hours, or 2 standard hours and 24 standard minutes.

Standard to Decimal:

-One standard second = 1.15740 decimal seconds
-One standard minute = 69.44 decimal seconds (or .69 decimal minutes)
-One standard hour = 4,166.67 decimal seconds (or 41 decimal minutes and 67 decimal seconds)

*All Time Goblins appear courtesy of Daniel Landsman.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Was Napoleon Poisoned?


Maybe so, maybe not. Either way, there was a lot of arsenic in his system...

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Must've Missed the Constitutionalism Lecture


I guess Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper doesn't remember what happened to Charles I when he tried to lock Parliament out. We can give him a hint: it has something to do with a Civil War and a beheading...



*Big Up to McLoventhal for the "head's up" (ha!) on this one.

Tycho Lives!


I know many of you saw it in class, but if you missed it, check out this article from the New York Times about "Tycho's supernova."