ISO 8601: Ending The Date Wars And Confusing Everyone Equally

April 21, 2021 by Jenny List 215 Comments

There’s a document I had to sign to wrap up a community responsibility in rural Oxfordshire. At the bottom, dotted lines for signature and date. My usual illegible scrawl for a signature, and scribble in the date below it. Then there’s the moment when the lady handling the form scans it with a puzzled face for a minute, before accepting it with a smile. She’s just been ISO’d!

A Pi Day pie — I’m telling you, you’ve got Pi Day wrong. Evan Shelhamer, CC BY 2.0.

Where I come from in England, it’s the norm to represent dates in ascending order: day, month, year. Thus the 4th of March 2021 becomes 04/03/2021 when written down on a form. This is entirely logical, and makes complete sense given the way a date is said aloud in English and other languages.

Meanwhile in America it’s the norm to represent dates in a different manner: month, day, year. Thus March 4th, 2021 becomes 03/04/2021 when written down on a form. This is also entirely logical, and makes complete sense given the way dates are pronounced in American English.

As someone whose job entails crossing the Atlantic in linguistic terms, I am frequently confused and caught out by this amusing quirk of being divided by a common language. Is 03/04/2021 the 3rd of April or March 4th? “Why can’t Americans use a logical date format!” I cry as in a distant transatlantic echo I hear my friends over there bemoaning our annoying European ways. It’s doubtful that this divergence has caused any satellites to crash, but it sure can be annoying.

Confusing Everyone For Over Three Decades

So I took a stand. A couple of decades ago I adopted ISO 8601 in writing dates, an international standard that’s been with us for well over three decades. It too is an entirely logical way to express time, but unlike the two mentioned earlier it’s not tied to any linguistic quirks. Instead it starts with the largest unit and expresses a date or time in descending order, and extends beyond dates into time. Thus the date on my form that caused the puzzlement was 2021-03-04. I’m guessing that here at Hackaday I’m preaching to the choir as I certainly won’t be the only one here using ISO 8601 in my daily life, but while we’re talking about alternative date formats within our community it’s an opportunity to take stock of the situation.

A UNIX epoch clock — Just in case you thought UNIX time wasn’t practical, take a look at this epoch clock.

UNIX time is probably the most instantly recognisable of all our measurement schemes, being a count of seconds elapsed since the Unix epoch of 1970-01-01T00:00:00+00:00 UTC. Coincidentally this is also an auspicious date for many readers, as it’s our birthday. If I’d written the 4th of March on that form as 1614816000 though I would have been met with complete incomprehension, so aside from the occasional moment of coming together to observe a rollover it’s not something we use outside coding.

But it does lead neatly to another question: since UNIX time is most often expressed in text as a base-10 number, why on earth does our clock time work in base 60 for seconds, base 12 or 24 for hours, and then base 12 for months? Why don’t we use a base 10 metric time system?

It makes sense for our annual calendar and the length of our day to be derived from Earth’s orbit, as we use dates as a measure of season and times as a measure of the daily progress rather than simply elapsed periods. We owe our twelve-hour days and nights to the ancient Greeks and our 60 seconds and minutes to the ancient Babylonians, while our twelve months come from the ancient Romans. It’s clear that a 365.24-day year with four seasons doesn’t divide neatly into ten months, so we’re at the mercy of our own set of celestial bodies when talking about dates. But surely we could move on from ancient Greece and Babylon when it comes to the time of day?

Liberté, Égalité, Ponctualité!

A 10-digit Revolutionary French clock. DeFacto, CC BY-SA 4.0

Probably the most famous attempt at a decimal calendar came in the aftermath of the French Revolution; the French Republican calendar perhaps wisely stuck with twelve months but made each of them of three 10-day weeks, and then split the day by 10 hours, with each further subdivision being by base 10. The months each had 30 days, with the remaining 5 days (or 6 in leap years) being public holidays.

It came to an official end when the revolutionary government that had introduced it was replaced by that of Napoleon. Unlike other French Republican measurements such as the meter, it evidently didn’t provide enough advantage for its popularity to outlive its political origins.

There’s an interesting parallel in the decimalisation of British currency in 1971. Previously, a pound was 20 shillings, each of which were 12 pence. Afterwards, a pound became 100 new pence, and that’s stuck. Despite some people’s lingering nostalgia for the old system, the utility of decimialisation was self-evident.

The moral of the French time-decimalization story was that people simply use a calendar and time system to tell the date and time. When you need to do frequent arithmetic, as is the case with currency, distance, or weights, this is made significantly easier through decimals. But when nature hands you four seasons, you’re pressed into twelve months. Perhaps when we slip the bonds of Earth, we’ll use decimal Stardates, but in the mean-time, ISO might just be the way to go.

Header: Rama, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR.

Weren’t We Supposed To Live In Plastic Houses In The Future?

April 13, 2021 by Jenny List 117 Comments

Futurism is dead. At least, the wildly optimistic technology-based futurism of the middle years of the 20th century has been replaced in our version of their future by a much more pessimistic model of environmental challenges and economic woes. No longer will our flying cars take us from our space-age wonder-homes to the monorail which will whisk us through sparkling-clean cities to our robotised workplaces, instead while we may have a global computer network and voice controlled assistants we still live in much the same outdated style as we did decades ago. Our houses are made from wood and bricks by blokes with shovels rather than prefabricated by robots and delivered in minutes, and our furniture would be as familiar to a person from the 1950s as it is for us.

A Plastic Future That Never Quite Happened

There was a time when the future of housing looked remarkably different. Just as today we are busily experimenting with new materials and techniques in the type of stories we feature on Hackaday, in the 1950s there was a fascinating new material for engineers and architects to work with in the form of plastics. The Second World War had spawned a huge industry that needed to be repurposed for peacetime production, so almost everything was considered for the plastic treatment, including houses. It seemed a natural progression that our 21st century houses would be space-age pods rather than the pitched-roof houses inherited from the previous century, so what better way could there be to make them than using the new wonder material? A variety of plastic house designs emerged during that period which remain icons to this day, but here we are five or six decades later and we still don’t live in them. To find out why, it’s worth a look at some of them, partly as a fascinating glimpse of what might have been, but mostly to examine them with the benefit of hindsight.

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Sixty Years Ago Today: Yuri Gagarin Becomes The First Human In Space

April 12, 2021 by Jenny List 17 Comments

As those of us with an interest in space exploration look forward with excitement towards new Lunar and Martian exploration, it’s worth casting our minds back for a moment because today marks a special anniversary. Sixty years ago on April 12th 1961, the Vostok 1 craft with its pilot Yuri Gagarin was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in what is now Kazakhstan. During the 108-minute mission he successfully completed an orbit of the Earth before parachuting from his craft after re-entry and landing on a farm near Engels, in the Saratov oblast to the south of Moscow.

In doing so he became the first human in space as well as the first to orbit the Earth, he became a hero to the Soviet and Russian people as well as the rest of the world, and scored a major victory for the Soviet space programme by beating the Americans to the prize. All the astronauts and cosmonauts who have been to space since then stand upon the shoulders of those first corps of pioneering pilots who left the atmosphere alone in their capsules, but it is Gagarin’s name that stands tallest among them.

In Russia the anniversary is being celebrated with particular fervour with special events, TV coverage, and a visit by President Putin to the landing site, and from space by the Russian cosmonauts in orbit on the ISS. Meanwhile space agencies closer to home are remaining tight-lipped, with NASA failing to mention that particular objective for ISS Expedition 65 crewmembers.

We consider that the politics of the Cold War should not be allowed to detract on our side of the world from the achievement of Gagarin and the engineers and scientists who placed him in orbit, thus we prefer to tell the whole story when dealing with space history. If you’d like to read a bit more Vostok history then we’d like to point you at the story of another Soviet cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.

Header image: Нина ПЕТРИЩЕВА, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Exhuming An Ancient Game From A Government Warehouse

April 12, 2021 by Jenny List 21 Comments

Many readers will be familiar with the final scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, in which the Ark of the Covenant, having been retrieved by Indiana Jones, is placed in a crate and wheeled off to be lost in the seemingly infinite depths of a dusty Government warehouse. Who knows what treasures lurk in such fabled taxpayer-funded repositories, and as if to prove their vast potential, [Arthur O’Dwyer] relates a tale of digital archaeology in which the entire source code of a game thought long-lost was regurgitated with the help of a civil servant.

The game in question is Castlequest, which he had played in the 1980s on the now-defunct GEnie online service. One of very few online references to it came via an entry in the copyright catalog of the US Copyright Office, where copyright holders can choose to register their works. Eventually after some detective work and a conversation with one of the game’s authors, he received copies of the entry. But instead of the expected summary, he was pleasantly surprised to find the full Fortran code of the game. The snag was that it came as a PDF scan of printed pages rather than as code itself, so there followed a tedious process of transcription before it could be published in a GitHub repository and eventually made compilable. The code remains copyrighted as an important part of its story, but should you be interested you can transport yourself back four decades and try your luck at text adventuring.

Maybe there’s more to be found in those dusty copyright warehouses, and searching for it has to be more pleasant than digging up landfills.

Learn Multirotors From First Principles

April 11, 2021 by Jenny List 5 Comments

Multirotors, or drones as they’re popularly called, are so ubiquitous as to have become a $10 toy. They’re no less fun to fly for it though, and learning how they work is no less fascinating. It’s something [Science Buddies] has addressed in a series of videos examining them from first principles. They may be aimed at youngsters, but they’re still an entertaining enough watch for those of advancing years.

Instead of starting with a multirotor control board, the video takes four little DC motors and two popsicle sticks to make a rudimentary drone frame. Then with the help of dowels and springs it tethers the craft as the control mechanisms are explained bit by bit, from simple on-off motor control through proportional control to adding an Arduino and following through to how a multirotor stays in flight. It’s instructional and fun to watch, and maybe even for some of us, a chance to learn something.

We’ve had multirotor projects aplenty here over the years, but how about something completely different made from popsicle sticks?

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The Simplest Wind Turbine Is The Most Satisfying

April 7, 2021 by Jenny List 37 Comments

Sometimes there’s a satisfaction to be found not in the more complex projects but the simplest ones. We’ve featured wind turbines of all types here at Hackaday over the years, but HowToLou’s one is probably one of the least sophisticated. That notwithstanding, it does its job admirably, and provides a handy reminder of a parts source many of us might have overlooked.

At its heart is a motor from an exercise treadmill, which appears to be quite a powerful DC motor so that’s a source worth noting away for any future projects. To that he attaches the blades from a desk fan, and when placed outdoors on a windy day it generates enough power to run an LED head torch and charge his phone.

Of course, this most basic of wind turbines is not displaying its true potential in the video below the break. Were it mounted in a high position free from ground based wind obstacles it would no doubt catch a lot more wind, and in particular were it hooked up to a charge controller and a battery it could provide a much more useful power source. Then you could start optimizing fan blade designs… But this is a fun project that isn’t trying to masquerade as anything sophisticated, and it still has that potential.

This isn’t the first such simple turbine we’ve brought you.

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Review: What On Earth Is An Electromagnetic Radiation Tester And Why Would I Need One?

April 7, 2021 by Jenny List 75 Comments

One of the joys of an itinerant existence comes in periodically being reunited with the fruits of various orders that were sent to hackerspaces or friends somewhere along the way. These anonymous parcels from afar hold an assortment of wonders, with the added element of anticipation that comes from forgetting exactly what had been ordered.

So it is with today’s subject, a Mustool MT525 electromagnetic radiation tester. At a cost not far above £10 ($13.70), this was an impulse purchase driven by curiosity; these devices claim to measure both magnetic and electric fields, but what do they really measure? My interest in these matters lies in the direction of radio, but I have never examined such an instrument. Time to subject it to the Hackaday treatment.

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