chronometry

A chronogram is an inscription where some of the letters, when interpreted as numerals, can form a date. The practice was begun during the late Roman Empire and can be…

Open Knowledge Conference 2009 A few weekends ago I gave a short talk about The Computus Engine at the Open Knowledge Conference in London. It was interesting to attend a…

If you’re familiar with how the Javascript or Actionscript Date class works you’ll know that a single Number lies at the core of any Date() value. This value counts the…

This Swedish Spruce is the world’s oldest living tree. The stem you can see in the picture is 13 foot tall and less than 600 years old, but what interests…

The second annual Greenwich Time Symposium will take place on Saturday 25th October at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Each symposia takes a sideways look at a particular aspect…

The National Debt Clock in Manhattan hit $10 trillion earlier this week causing a “rollover” problem. This is when the data model (or in this case display) is no longer…

Fragment A of the Antikythera mechanism The detailed report reveals the device was capable of tracking lunar and solar cycles, eclipse cycles and the four-year cycle of the Olympiad and…

Echoes of the Big Bang: cosmic background radiation by temperature In order to build a timeline that can display any point in time I’m first going to need a datatype…

You’ll have to be pretty quick to celebrate it but just before midnight on the 31st of December 2008 a leap second will be added to UTC. I’ve mentioned leap…