Today's Switzerland - and its cherished bank secrecy - still reflect the influence of church reformer Jean Calvin, an economic think tank director tells swissinfo.
This content was published onApril 26, 2009 - 10:21
6 minutes
Xavier Comtesse, who heads the western Swiss branch of Avenir Suisse, says Calvin stood for morality in the granting of credit, but also for protection of the personal sphere.
This year marks the 500th birthday of the religious reformer whose ideas shaped the Protestant Church. In his honour Protestant denominations have designated 2009 Calvin Year.
Calvin, who spent much of his time working in Geneva, not only influenced democracy in Switzerland but modern-day thinking on both moral and financial matters, Comtesse believes.
swissinfo: What is the basis of Calvin’s Protestantism?
Xavier Comtesse: It is based on the Bible written in the language of the people, on the separation of church and state, and on the understanding that the grassroots faithful – who fund the community – choose their own priests.
This Calvinist form of institutional organisation has also over time had an influence on non-religious areas of the Swiss mentality. All state institutions remain separate from religious ones, and bottom up participation in political decisions continues from communal to national level.
Both lead to an emancipation of the people, an ’empowerment’, as we say today.
swissinfo: What would Switzerland look like today without Calvin?
X.C.: I don’t think we’d have direct democracy without this popular emancipation that was spurred on by Calvin. We would probably be a republic [with an elected president], like our neighbours. Of course when talking about German-speaking Switzerland we should mention [Zurich reformer Huldrych] Zwingli just as much as Calvin.
This communication from community organisations up to the highest state level is typical for us Swiss.
swissinfo: To what extent was Geneva more significant than Zurich?
X.C.: In those days French-speaking Switzerland did not exist. Geneva was the place to be – across the whole country. Basel was worth considering, but Zurich wasn’t. Neither was Bern nor Lausanne.
That is also why Calvin is rated so much more important internationally than Zwingli. Even in the post-Napoleonic period Zurich was smaller than Geneva both in the number of inhabitants and economically.
swissinfo: How did Calvin stamp the mark of the Reformation and the image of Switzerland on the world?
X.C.: I know most about his influence on the United States. There Calvinism is very pronounced with around 15 million Calvinists – called Presbyterians in Anglo-Saxon countries.
There are also communities in Scotland and South Korea. Worldwide there are said to be around 50 million Presbyterians. But there are very few of them in Switzerland.
swissinfo: What was Calvin’s influence on the economy and banking?
X.C.: As a reaction to the papal selling of indulgences as a mean of raising money for Rome, Calvin was one of the first church leaders to permit the granting of loans with interest – albeit tied to high moral standards.
That forged a link with the present: extortionate interest didn’t come into question, therefore the loans had to be cheap. As in religion and politics, the thinking behind this banking was to protect the citizen through high moral standards.
Also considered worth protecting by Protestantism was the personal sphere. Add this to being able to bank and you get banking secrecy.
swissinfo: Historically banking secrecy was meant to protect citizens from state interference.
X.C.: Exactly. And that’s why there are many misunderstandings concerning the term. The description ‘banking secrecy’ is actually incorrect – ‘protection of the private sphere by the bank’ would be more appropriate.
Such legal protection is not unique to Switzerland. In France for example a wife has no right to any information about her husband’s bank account – French legal law considers that his private sphere.
We Swiss simply go one step further. We protect against any state despotism. This way of thinking has historical roots in Protestantism, which in Calvin’s time sought to protect the people against the despotism of the powerful Catholic Church.
swissinfo: What remains from these Calvinist ethics today – bearing in mind the drama playing out in the world of banking and finance?
X.C.: At the moment we’re in a moral crisis. As a result we’ll soon have to grapple more with social responsibility.
That will be a form of secular Calvinism with new, still moral, but no longer religious characteristics. Regarding quality for example – new ISO standards in the area of quality attempt to rectify deficits in the area of responsibility.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is based in Geneva – like many other international institutions. This is also part of Calvin’s legacy.
Another ‘Geneva’ institution is the World Wide Web – invented at Cern. This also works ‘Calvinistically’ insofar as it enables direct access to information to the population, or rather the user.
Until now, powerful intermediaries were needed for this access. The internet has reformed access to the markets – similar to Calvin’s reformation of direct access to God.
After official talks with the Swiss leaders, the pope will make the short journey to the WCC headquarters for an ecumenical prayer session with local church representatives. After lunch at the Ecumenical Institute at the Chteau BosseyExternal link in neighbouring canton Vaud, he will return to the WCC for talks.
Why is the pope visiting the WCC? I thought the Roman Catholic Church was not a member of the Geneva-based organisation.
Founded in 1948, the World Council of Churches (WCC)External link brings together the world’s Orthodox, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran and Reformed churches but not the Catholic Church, with whom it has had a complicated relationship. The pope’s visit goes under the motto ‘Walking, praying and working together’ and is the result of five years’ efforts by WCC officials to persuade him to come to Geneva following Francis’ appointment in 2013.
Despite not being affiliated, around 50 Vatican observers participate in WCC committees dealing with issues such as peace promotion, religious doctrine and education. The pope’s trip is thus seen as a highly significant working visit and attempt to boost Christian unity.
Geneva will be the second European visit by Francis with a clear ecumenical accent after his visit to Lund in Sweden in October 2016 to mark the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation alongside leaders of the Lutheran World Federation.
Will he hold a mass?
Yes. The pope is due to hold a mass at 5.30pm at the Palexpo convention centreExternal link next to Geneva Airport. Some 41,000 lucky ticket-holders will be waiting for him but the event will also be broadcast live on Swiss public television, RTS/SRF/RSI.
Most of the Swiss population are Christian but Christianity is on the decline and the percentage of non-believers is growing. Catholics are the biggest faith group – 37% of permanent residents in 2016, down from 47% in 1970, according to the Federal Statistical Office.
Over a quarter of all Swiss Catholics attend a religious service between six to 12 times a year. A survey commissioned by the Swiss Catholic Bishops Conference on marital and family issues in 2014 revealed liberal attitudes to sex and marriage.
The percentage of Swiss Protestants has fallen sharply since 1970 from 49% to 25% in 2015. Geneva, the city of Jean Calvin, is sometimes referred to as the Protestant Rome. However, times have changed. In 2016, around 35% of the city’s residents claimed to be Catholic, while 24% said they were Protestant.
Pope Francis is welcomed at Geneva Airport by Alain Berset, who holds the rotating Swiss presidency this year Keystone
Pope Francis has visited the Swiss city of Geneva – a centre of Protestantism – on a whirlwind one-day tour to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the World Council of Churches (WCC) and to promote Christian unity.
This content was published onJune 21, 2018 - 21:23
4 minutes
swissinfo.ch/ds-jh-sb
The pope flew into Geneva – historically known as the “Protestant Rome” for its links to John Calvin – on a hot Thursday morning for a packed schedule that began with a meeting at the airport with Swiss government officials.
After a 20-minute tête-à-tête, Alain Berset, who holds the rotating Swiss presidency this year, told reporters that he shared the pope’s commitment to peace and human rights.
Berset said the pope had urged Switzerland to use dialogue to help prevent conflicts around the world. The two leaders also discussed the issue of immigration and refugee boats from north Africa that were being blocked by Italy.
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‘The pope and Switzerland have much in common’
This content was published onJun 21, 2018 Swiss President Alain Berset says Switzerland and the pope share common values. (SRF/swissinfo.ch)
Francis was then driven to the WCC headquarters in Geneva just south of the airport for an ecumenical prayer session with local church representatives. The Roman Catholic Church is not a member of the WCC, which brings together the world’s Orthodox, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran and Reformed churches, but it does send observers to participate in several WCC committees.
The papal visit, which went under the motto “Walking, praying and working together”, marks a significant effort to bridge the divide between the Vatican and other Christian churches.
At the WCC, the 81-year-old Argentinian pope warned worshippers against the dangers of “unbridled consumerism”, saying it leads to the exclusion of children and the elderly. “We have lost our direction,” he said.
In his speeches at the WCC and throughout the day, the pope called for deeper unity between the Catholic Church and other Christian faiths.
“I have desired to come here, a pilgrim in quest of unity and peace,” he told the prayer gathering.
It is the third time that a pope has visited the WCC after Paul VI in 1960 and John Paul II 35 years ago. Historically, divisions between the Catholic Church and the Protestant confessions have run deep.
The pope also referred to the “ecumenism of blood”, condemning the indiscriminate murder of Catholics, Orthodox and Protestant Christians.
“Let us also look to our many brothers and sisters in various parts of the world, particularly in the Middle East, who suffer because they are Christians,” he said.
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Papal watching
This content was published onJun 21, 2018 Here are some colourful moments taken during Pope Francis’s visit to Switzerland.
The pope ended his one-day visit by celebrating a mass at 5.30pm at the Palexpo convention centreExternal link next to Geneva Airport for 30,000 people, according to a police estimate. The organisers said 37,000 had attended. But this was still slightly down on the expected figure of 41,000.
Worshippers sat on chairs in the massive hangar, which hosts the Geneva International Motor Show every year and is the size of six football pitches.
Most of the lucky ticket-holders were from Switzerland – cantons Geneva, Fribourg, Jura, Valais and Zurich – but also from neighbouring France, and even as far away as Spain, Slovakia and Croatia. Some had started queuing as early as 7.30am.
The pontiff was greeted like a rock star with cheers and a sea of mobile phones when he arrived in the hall in his “Popemobile”.
Speaking in Italian and French on a simple stage which featured a large white cross overhead and a drawing of the Alps, he urged the audience to “rediscover the courage of silence and of prayer”.
A handful of former Swiss guardsmen, dressed in traditional blue-red-and-yellow-striped Renaissance-inspired uniforms, were also present for the mass and ceremonial activities at the airport.
In Rome, the Pontifical Swiss GuardExternal link has been tasked with protecting the pope and his official palace in the Vatican City since 1506, when the first Swiss mercenaries arrived on request of the then Pope Julius II.
Pope Francis ended his mass to huge applause by thanking the Geneva people and the Swiss authorities.
“I salute the citizens of this beautiful city,” he declared. “I want to thank the Swiss government for the friendly invitation and precious collaboration.”
Everybody knows that there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in minute. But in 1793, the French smashed the old clock system in favor of French Revolutionary Time, which was a 10-hour day, with 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds per minute. This thoroughly modern system had a few practical benefits, chief among them being a simplified way to do time-related math. If we want to know when a day is 80% complete, decimal time simply says "at the end of the eighth hour," whereas standard time requires us to say "at 19 hours, 12 minutes." French Revolutionary Time was a more elegant solution to that math problem. The problem was that every living person already had a well-established way of telling the time, and old habits die hard!
French Revolutionary Time officially began on November 24, 1793 although conceptual work around the system had been going on since the 1750s. The French manufactured clocks and watches showing both decimal time and standard time on their faces (allowing for both conversion and confusion). These clock faces were spectacularly weird.
The system proved unpopular. People were unfamiliar with switching systems of time, and there were few practical reasons for non-mathematicians to change how they told time. (The same could not be said of the metric system of weights and measurements, which helped to standardize commerce; weights and measurements often differed in neighboring countries, but clocks generally did not.) Furthermore, replacing every clock and watch in the country was an expensive proposition. The French officially stopped using decimal time after just 17 months. French Revolutionary Time became non-mandatory starting on April 7, 1795. This didn't stop some areas of the country from continuing to observe decimal time, and a few decimal clocks remained in use for years afterwards, presumably leading to many missed appointments!
LIVE NORMAL AND DECIMAL TIME
Live NORMAL time
Live DECIMAL time
DECIMAL TO NORMAL / NORMAL TO DECIMAL TIME CONVERTER
Enter decimall time:
Use HH:MM:SS format
Result in "normal" time:
Enter "normal" time:
Use HH:MM:SS format
Result in decimall time:
Some applications using decimal time are available in both Google Play and the Apple Store. For example, for Android - DecimalTime ; for Apple - DeciTime .
Se denomina tiempo decimal a la expresión de la extensión del día utilizando unidades que se encuentran relacionadas mediante un sistema decimal. Este término es utilizado para referirse específicamente al tiempo revolucionario francés, el cual divide al día en 10 horas decimales, cada hora decimal en 100 minutos decimales y cada minuto decimal en 100 segundos decimales, en contraposición al tiempo estándar usual, en el cual el día se divide en 24 horas, cada hora en 60 minutos y cada minuto en 60 segundos.
El tiempo decimal fue utilizado en China a lo largo de casi toda su historia junto con el tiempo duodecimal. Hacia el año 1000 a. C. el día que se extendía desde una medianoche a la medianoche siguiente se encontraba dividido en 12 horas dobles (chino tradicional: 時辰; chino simplificado: 时辰; pinyin: shíchen) y 100 ke (Hanzi: 刻; Pinyin: kè).[1] Durante tres períodos breves se utilizaron un número diferente de kes por día, 120 ke durante 5–3 A.d. C., 96 ke durante 507–544, y 108 ke durante 544–565. Varios de los casi 50 calendarios chinos también dividieron cada ke en 100 fen, aunque en otros cada ke era dividido en 60 fen. En 1280, el calendario Shoushi (Season Granting) subdividió a cada fen en 100 miao, creando un sistema decimal completo de 100 ke, 100 fen y 100 miao.[2] El tiempo decimal chino dejó de ser utilizado en 1645 cuando el calendario Shixian (Constant Conformity), basado en la astronomía europea llevada a China por los jesuitas, adoptó 96 ke por día junto con 12 horas dobles, con lo cual cada ke corresponde exactamente a un cuarto de hora.[3]
En tiempos modernos, el tiempo decimal fue introducido durante la Revolución francesa por un decreto promulgado el 5 de octubre de 1793:
XI. Le jour, de minuit à minuit, est divisé en dix parties, chaque partie en dix autres, ainsi de suite jusqu’à la plus petite portion commensurable de la durée.
XI. El día, desde medianoche hasta la medianoche siguiente, se divide en diez partes, cada parte a su vez se compone de diez partes, y así sucesivamente hasta la duración de tiempo más pequeña que se pueda medir.
Se les dio nombre a estas partes el 24 de noviembre de 1793 (4 Frimario del Año II). Las divisiones primarias se denominaron horas, y se agregó:
La centième partie de l'heure est appelée minute décimale; la centième partie de la minute est appelée seconde décimale. (énfasis en el original)
La centésima parte de una hora es denominada minuto decimal; la centésima parte de un minuto es denominada segundo decimal.
Por lo tanto, medianoche correspondía a la hora 10, mediodía a la hora 5, etc. Si bien se fabricaron relojes con cuadrantes mostrando el tiempo estándar con los números 1–24 y el tiempo decimal con los números 1–10, el tiempo decimal nunca contó con gran aceptación; no fue utilizado de manera oficial hasta comienzos del año Republicano III, 22 de septiembre de 1794, y el uso obligatorio fue suspendido el 7 de abril de 1795 (18 Germinal del Año III), mediante la misma ley que introdujo el sistema métrico original. Por lo tanto, inicialmente el sistema métrico no poseía una unidad de tiempo, y versiones posteriores del sistema métrico utilizan el segundo, igual a 1/86400 de día, como unidad de tiempo métrico.
El tiempo decimal fue introducido como parte del calendario republicano francés, en el cual además de dividir el día en forma decimal, dividió al mes en tres décadas de 10 días cada una; este calendario fue abolido a finales del 1805. El comienzo de cada año era determinado según el día en él tenía lugar el equinoccio de otoño, en relación con el tiempo solar aparente o verdadero en el Observatorio de París. El tiempo decimal habría sido expresado también según el tiempo solar aparente, dependiendo de la posición desde la cual se lo registraba, como ya era la costumbre general para ajustar los relojes.
En 1897 los franceses realizaron otro intento de decimalizar el tiempo, cuando se creó la Commission de décimalisation du temps en el Bureau des Longitudes, siendo secretario el matemático Henri Poincaré. La comisión propuso un compromiso, al mantener el día de 24 horas, pero dividir cada hora en 100 minutos decimales, y cada minuto en 100 segundos. El plan no tuvo buena acogida y fue abandonado en 1900.
Hay exactamente 86.400 segundos estándar (véase SI para una definición actual del segundo estándar) en un día estándar, pero en el sistema de tiempo decimal francés hay 100.000 segundos decimales en un día, por lo que el segundo decimal es más corto que su contraparte.
Son los científicos y los programadores de computadoras lo que utilizan en forma más asidua el tiempo decimal del día en forma de día fraccional. El tiempo estándar de 24 horas es convertido en un día fraccional simplemente mediante dividir el número de horas pasadas desde la medianoche por 24 para obtener una fracción decimal. Por lo tanto medianoche es 0,0 día, mediodía es 0,5 d, etc., lo cual se puede componer con cualquier tipo de fecha, tales como:
Es posible utilizar tantos sitios decimales como sea necesario de acuerdo a la precisión requerida, de forma que 0,5 d = 0,500000 d. Los días fraccionarios a menudo son expresados en UTC o TT, aunque las fechas Julianas utilizan fecha/tiempo astronómico anterior a 1925 (cada fecha comenzaba en el 0h por lo tanto ".0" = mediodía) y Microsoft Excel utiliza la zona de tiempo local de la computadora. El uso de días fraccionarios reduce el número de unidades utilizadas en cálculos de tiempo de cuatro (días, horas, minutos, segundos) a una sola (días). A menudo los astrónomos utilizan días fraccionarios para registrar sus observaciones, y fueron indicados haciendo referencia al Paris Mean Time por el matemático y astrónomo francés del siglo xviii Pierre-Simon Laplace en su libro, Traité de Mécanique Céleste, tal como en estos ejemplos:
... et la distance périhélie, égale à 1,053095 ; ce qui a donné pour l'instant du passage au périhélie, sept.29,10239, temps moyen compté de minuit à Paris.
Les valeurs précédentes de a, b, h, l, relatives à trois observations, ont donné la distance périhélie égale à 1,053650; et pour l'instant du passage, sept.29,04587; ce qui diffère peu des résultats fondés sur cinq observations.
Días fraccionales fueron utilizados durante el siglo xix por el astrónomo británico John Herschel en su libro, Outlines of Astronomy, como se ilustra en estos ejemplos:
Between Greenwich noon of the 22d and 23d of March, 1829, the 1828th equinoctial year terminates, and the 1829th commences. This happens at 0 d•286003, or at 4 h 51 m 50 s •66 Greenwich Mean Time ... For example, at 12 h 0 m 0 s Greenwich Mean Time, or 0 d•500000...
En general el sistema de segundos fraccionales es más utilizado que el de días fraccionales. En efecto, esta es la representación en una única unidad que utilizan numerosos lenguajes de programación, incluidos C, y parte de los estándares UNIX/POSIX utilizados por Mac OS X, Linux, etc.; para convertir días fraccionales en segundos fraccionales, multiplican el número por 86400. Tiempos absolutos son a menudo expresados relativos a la medianoche del 1 de enero de 1970. Otros sistemas pueden utilizar un punto cero distinto, pueden contar en milisegundos en vez de segundos, etc.
El 23 de octubre de 1998, la compañía fabricante de relojes Suiza, Swatch, presentó un tiempo decimal denominado Swatch Internet Time, el cual divide al día en 1000 beats (cada uno 86,4 s) contados en el rango 000–999, con @000 medianoche y @500 mediodía CET (UTC +1), en contraposición al UTC.[4] La empresa ha vendido relojes que indican el Tiempo de Internet.
Internet Time ha sido criticado por utilizar un origen diferente al utilizado por el Horario universal, tergiversar CET al presentarlo como "Biel Mean Time", y por no tener unidades más precisas, aunque ciertas organizaciones han propuesto los "centibeats" (864 ms) y "milibeats" (86.4 ms).
Distintas personas han propuesto un rango de variaciones al tiempo decimal, dividiendo al día en diferente número de unidades y subunidades con diversos nombres. La mayoría están basados en días fraccionarios, de forma que un formato de tiempo decimal puede ser fácilmente convertido en otro, de forma tal que todos estos son equivalentes:
Algunas propuestas de tiempo decimal están basadas en unidades de medidas alternativas del tiempo métrico. La diferencia entre el tiempo métrico y el tiempo decimal es que en el tiempo métrico se definen las unidades para medir intervalos de tiempo, tal como se lo mide con un cronómetro, mientras que el tiempo decimal define el tiempo del día, tal como lo mide un reloj. Así como el tiempo estándar utiliza como base el segundo la unidad métrica de tiempo, las escalas de tiempo decimal propuestas pueden utilizar otras unidades métricas.
Swatch Internet Time (or .beat time) is a decimal time system introduced in 1998 by the Swatch corporation as part of the marketing campaign for their line of ".beat" watches. Those without a watch could use the Internet to view the current time on the watchmaker's website, but now a dedicated wiki serves the purpose.[1] The concept of .beat time is similar to decimal minutes in French Revolutionary decimal time.[2]
Instead of hours and minutes, in Swatch Time the mean solar day is divided into 1,000 equal parts called .beats, meaning each .beat lasts 86.4 seconds (1.440 minutes) in standard time, and an hour lasts for approximately 42 .beats. The time of day always references the amount of time that has passed since midnight (standard time) in Biel, Switzerland, where Swatch's headquarters is located. For example, @248 BEATS indicates a time 248 .beats after midnight, or 248⁄1000 of a day (just over 5 hours and 57 minutes; or 5:57 AM UTC+1).
There are no time zones in Swatch Internet Time; it is a globally unified timekeeping system based on what Swatch calls "Biel Mean Time" (BMT), the time zone conventionally known as Central European Time or West Africa Time. Note that it is based on the time zone and not the actual mean solar time measured in Biel. Also, unlike civil time in Switzerland and many other countries, Swatch Internet Time has never observed daylight saving time (DST), even prior to more recent decisions to abandon DST in certain locales.[3]
Swatch Internet Time was announced on 23 October 1998, in a ceremony at the Junior Summit '98,[4] attended by Nicolas G. Hayek, president and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, president of Swatch Ltd., and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and then director of the MIT Media Lab. During the summit, Swatch Internet Time became the official time system for Nation.1, an online country (supposedly) created and run by children.
A Swatch watch showing .beat time in the bottom part of the display
During 1999, Swatch produced several models of watch, branded "Swatch .beat", that displayed Swatch Internet Time as well as standard time, and even convinced a few websites (such as CNN.com) to use the new format.[5]PHP's date() function has a format specifier, 'B', which returns the Swatch Internet Time notation for a given time stamp.[6] It was also used as a time reference on ICQ, and the online role-playing gamePhantasy Star Online used it since its launch on the Dreamcast in 2000 to try to facilitate cross-continent gaming (as the game allowed Japanese, American and European players to mingle on the same servers). In March 2001, Ericsson released the T20e, a mobile phone which gave the user the option of displaying Internet Time. Outside these areas, it is infrequently used. While Swatch still offers the concept on its website, it no longer markets Beat watches.[citation needed] In July 2016, Swatch released Touch Zero Two, its second wirelessly connected watch, with Swatch Internet Time function.
In early 1999, Swatch began a marketing campaign about the launch of their Beatnik satellite, intended to service a set of Internet Time watches. They were criticized for planning to use an amateur radio frequency for broadcasting a commercial message (an act banned by international treaties). The satellite was intended to be deployed by hand from the Mir space station. Swatch instead donated the transmitter batteries for use in normal Mir functions, and the satellite never broadcast.[7]
The concept was touted as an alternative, decimal measure of time. One of the supposed goals was to simplify the way people in different time zones communicate about time, mostly by eliminating time zones altogether. It also does away with the division of the day into 12 or 24 parts (hours), then 60 parts (minutes), then 60 parts (seconds), then 1000 parts (milliseconds). Furthermore, there is no confusion between the AM/PM system and 24-hour time.
Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided into 1,000 parts called .beats. Each .beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds. One .beat is equal to one decimal minute in French decimal time.
Although Swatch does not specify units smaller than one .beat, third party implementations have extended the standard by adding "centibeats" or "sub-beats", for extended precision: @248.00. Each "centibeat" is a hundredth of a .beat and is therefore equal to one French decimal second (0.864 seconds).[8][9]
There are no time zones; instead, the new time scale of Biel Mean Time (BMT) is used, based on the company's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland. Despite the name, BMT does not refer to mean solar time at the Biel meridian (7°15′E), but to the standard time there. It is equivalent to Central European Time and West Africa Time, or UTC+1.
Like UTC, Swatch Internet Time is the same throughout the world. For example, when the time is 875 .beats, or @875, in New York, it is also @875 in Tokyo. Unlike civil time in most European countries, Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time, and thus it matches Central European Time during (European) winter and Western European Summer Time, which is observed by the United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal and Spain's Canary Islands during summer.
The most distinctive aspect of Swatch Internet Time is its notation; as an example, "@248" would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight, equivalent to a fractional day of 0.248 CET, or 04:57:07.2 UTC. No explicit format was provided for dates, although the Swatch website formerly displayed the Gregorian calendar date in the order day-month-year, separated by periods and prefixed by the letter d (e.g. d31.01.99).[citation needed]
Nous sommes heureux de partager avec vous, amis pèlerins, la joie de la rencontre fraternelle ! Ce chemin se veut être une démarche de pèlerinage dans l’esprit de Saint François. Accueillir la fraternité comme un cadeau, rechercher la simplicité et même la sobriété, vivre l’instant présent sans se soucier, c’est s’imprégner petit à petit de l’esprit de l’évangile tel que St François a choisi de le vivre. Le chemin est ouvert à toutes et tous et il apportera une joie authentique à celles et ceux qui auront au plus vrai d’eux-mêmes la paix du cœur.
Chemins de foi, chemins pour tous
Depuis de nombreux siècles, des pèlerins ont traversé l’Europe pour se rendre en Terre Sainte, à St Jacques de Compostelle, à Rome … pour des raisons spirituelles essentiellement mais ensuite aussi pour des raisons économiques et, plus récemment, pour goûter aux plaisirs de la marche, des paysages, du silence et de la solitude …
Aujourd’hui, de plus en plus de personnes, croyantes ou non, empruntent ces chemins tracés par les premiers pèlerins.
Un peu partout, des associations se sont créées pour redonner vie à ces itinéraires, notamment ceux vers Compostelle, mais aussi celui de Canterbury à Rome (« via francigena »), le Chemin de St-Michel, et bien d’autres. C’est aussi le cas pour ce « récent » chemin de 1500 km vers Assise.
Ainsi, elles témoignent d’un intérêt renouvelé pour la découverte du patrimoine culturel et artistique et pour une autre forme de ressourcement personnel ou de recherche d’épanouissement par un nouveau style de loisirs.
Use the (slightly larger) Moon size instead of the SPS
Now the orbit of Venus passes right through the center of the lunar SPS…
And it is no random point on Venus's orbit: The lunar SPS center is specifically pinpointing Venus's "ascending node". That's where Venus crosses northward the plane of Earth's orbit (i.e. the ecliptic or the plane of the solar system)!
The ~3.4 degrees rotation actually makes perfect sense here because:
The ascending node is all about the inclination of the orbit relative to the ecliptic or Earth's orbital plane…
In the case of Venus, the orbital inclination is 3.4 degrees, matching the ~3.4 degree rotation required to bring the (lunar) SPS center to the Venus ascending node
Ascending nodes will play a critical role later on as well so we can be certain this is no coincidence.
The curious position of the SPS has now been perfectly explained.
Line of Nodes & Transit of Venus
The ascending node of Venus is aligned with the Galactic Meridian or "longitude 0" of the Milky Way (which passes through the Galactic Center and is perpendicular to the Milky Way/Galactic Equator).
The line is also heliocentrically aligned with Earth around June 8 and December 9 every year right when Earth's orbital position coincides with the LHC's ATLAS and CMS detectors.
From Earth's perspective, the Sun is at the Galactic Meridian on ~June 8 and ~December 9.
It's right there at the Sun's ~June 8 position that what astronomers call the Transit of Venus takes place, which is a very rare celestial event when Venus passes right in front of the Sun due to a very precise Earth-Venus-Sun alignment (accurate in 3D):
The most recent transit pair (they come in pairs) was in 2004 and 2012 (June 8 & June 6 respectively). The LHC went live in 2008 which was right at the halfway point, i.e. 4 years after the 1st Venus Transit and 4 years before the 2nd Venus Transit. (The previous Venus Transit pair was December 1874 and December 1882; the next pair will be December 10–11, 2117, and December 8, 2125.)
That's enough evidence for us to safely conclude that the LHC was fully cognizant of what was happening in the sky.
Secret Design #3 - Mars-Mercury-Earth Orbital Interaction
Let us go deeper into the rabbit hole through… Mars. It is through Mars that we will finally flesh out the "Orion Stargate.
What we'll do now is, instead of Earth's orbit, we'll use Mars' orbit as the celestial analogue of the LHC like this:
[Note: The LHC/SPS is still in its 3.4 deg.-rotated orientation]
While nothing seems to stand out initially, we do get our first confirmation after rotating the LHC so that the SPS would "kiss" Mars' perihelion i.e. Mars' closest point to the Sun (and to Earth's orbit), like this:
Earth's orbit (green) passes right through the center of the SPS
Earth's equinoctial axis (horizontal) is tangential to the SPS
Now we are ready for the main revelation which commences with the following observation…
As we noted back then, Kylie is also striking an "Atlas pose"...
...supported by the fact that "Atlas" (atl) can mean "elevator" as researcher Andrew Collins writes in Gateway To Atlantis:
...in addition to meaning 'exalted', the Hebrew word atl, and indeed its variations, can also mean 'elevated'...
Since we know that Mount Atlas was deemed to be the petrified Titan supporting the heavens on his shoulders, Atlas' name is therefore intrinsically linked with his action of having elevated or raised up these misty heights. Clearly, then, this connection strongly suggests that the name Atlas does not derive from the Indo-European language of the Greeks but from the Punic language of the Carthaginians - furthermore, that the word root atl does not mean 'to bear' but 'to elevate' or 'to raise'... If this was the case, it tells us that, as a noun, Atlas, and indeed ATLA, might well translate as 'the elevator', 'the exalter', or indeed 'the exalted one'. (Andrew Collins, Gateway to Atlantis, p.200)
This is highly significant in our current context as the Atlas-Venus-elevator combination is exactly what was part of our decoding of CERN's LHC, as I noted in my article CERN's Orion Stargate (Oct 8, 2015):
The LHC experiment installation ATLAS is right at the contact point of the SPS and LCH loops(which are geometrically tangent circles)
The SPS's center pinpointsVenus at its ascending node (i.e. where Venus crosses the ecliptic plane northward)
"Ascending" can imply "elevating/elevator"
Venus will be right there on June 6-7, 2016 - Prince's birthday - precisely at the time of its heliocentric alignment with Earth (superior conjunction)!
In addition to his birthday being a key clue, Prince from 1993 through 2000 was known as "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince" identified only with what came to be known as the "Love Symbol". Venus is the goddess of love and Prince's Love Symbol is based on the astrological Venus symbol.
Not only that, Kylie Minogue (= Aphrodite/Venus) revealed shortly after Prince's death via Instagram that she and Prince recorded an (as yet unreleased) "secret song" together back in the '90s:
So those are some of the more visually engaging clues pertaining to the upcoming window of late May-early June 2016.
Let me go ahead and introduce one more big piece of the puzzle. This one ominously having to do with... "Deep Impact".
NASA's Deep Impact mission was all about smacking a comet near the orbital path of Mars and it was successfully accomplished on July 4th, 2005. As shown below, Comet Tempel-1 "kisses" Mars' orbit (i.e. tangent), and it was right there that the comet's encounter with Deep Impact took place, almost exactly where the two orbital paths converge. In this way the mission was implicitly a "Martian Deep Impact".
And once again it is going to be right there at the same impact position that we'll find Mars in late May/early June 2016 (~June 1) when Mars will be at its closet point to Earth!
We can't help but wonder if some form of a "Deep Impact" situation is looming for the late May-early June window.
Additional insights may be gleaned from the fact that Mars was also there earlier on October 11-12, 2010...
...right at the time of the dramatic Chilean mine rescue on October 9-13, 2010, (yet another event/clue from 2010 - aka "The Year We Make Contact"), featuring a lot of inverted pentagrams...
[Kylie Minogue is from Down Under (Australia) or "Underworld"]
...and an elevator!
It was named Fenix/Phoenix...
...resonating again with Mars via NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander (2008):
And finally, Planet X, a key motif of 2016 which came to the forefront with the January 20 announcement proclaiming new evidence for the existence of Planet X or "Planet Nine", re-enters the picture...
Turns out, it was in July 2005, i.e. the month of the Deep Impact-comet encounter, that the dwarf planet Eris was discovered, initially considered the "10th planet" or "Planet X".
It will be fascinating to see what happens. Will it be subtle, as per "the devil's in the details", or a bona-fide "Deep Impact" event? We'll find out soon enough. There are other significant windows coming up later this year, notably one around early August. We've already looked into that one extensively on STRUG and it looks a bit... earthshaking, geologically, financially, etc. But we still got time before that.
So that's enough for now. Let's get ready for the "hidden form"...
David Bowie, Super Bowl & Gravitational Waves By Goro Adachi
February 10, 2016
On February 11, LIGO - the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory - is expected to announce at the National Press Club in Washington DC they have detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes. Some call it the most important breakthrough in modern science.
As expected, such a major novelty comes with intense multicontextual (i.e. symbolic/synchronistic) "whispers". In this article I'd like to quickly point out how this scientific discovery interacts with and was foreshadowed by the passing of David Bowie (Jan 10) and the Super Bowl (Feb 07).
Though a lot has already been said about the heavy symbolism of David Bowie's passing accompanied by his new song/video & album, Blackstar...
...no one seem to have paid attention to the typical depiction of gravitational distortion on the cover of the Blackstar single (song):
Per Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, massive objects like planets and stars warp the fabric of spacetime around it, producing an invisible pull called "gravity".
Gravity was discovered by Isaac Newton supposedly when he saw an apple fall from a tree...
...resonating with Super Bowl 50:
A black star quarterback named "Newton" took a big fall
The first song Coldplay performed at the Super Bowl (halftime show) was Viva la Vida, which back in 2008 was memorably used in Apple's TV commercial
Coldplay's front man Chris Martin named his daughter "Apple"
"Black stars" at Super Bowl 50:
Cam Newton is a black star quarterback (NFL MVP)
"The Panthers are the most unapologetically black team in NFL history" (source)
The halftime show was very black in nature due to Beyonce's all-black group all dressed in black and Bruno Mars' all-black group all dressed in black, amplified by the controversial black power/Black Panther message telegraphed by Beyonce
UPDATES:
The Black Panther Party's founder/original leader was named Newton (Huey P. Newton)
David Bowie in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth played the main character named Thomas Jerome Newton
Bowie's Blackstar (song) was used as opening music for the television series The Last Panthers directed by Johan Renck who also directed the music video for Blackstar. [h/t reader Szabolcs]
Gravity (Newton/apple) and black star(s)...
[Left: Blackstar single cover | Right: Blackstar album cover]
Notice the "black star" creating a "gravity well" is invisible in the Blackstar single cover art... a la Planet X or more pertinently here a black hole.
1. Planet X
Strong evidence for the existence of Planet X or "Planet Nine" was announced on January 20th, 2016, mere 10 days after the passing of David Bowie and 12 days after the release of his new album Blackstar.
The scientists did not see the planet. Instead, they inferred its existence from examining the peculiar clustering of six previously known objects that orbit beyond Neptune, theorizing that the clustering has been caused by the gravitational pull of the hidden giant, Planet Nine/X. An invisible planet - a "black star" - leaving behind only gravitation effects.
2. Black Hole
Black holes, by definition, are invisible. They are "black" because not even light can escape their extreme gravity. Not surprisingly "black star" or "dark star" is a scientific term for what is essentially a black hole, i.e. a star whose gravity is strong enough to trap light.
Astronomers may finally have found elusive gravitational waves, the mysterious ripples in the fabric of spacetime whose existence was first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916, in his famous theory of general relativity.
Scientists are holding a news conference Thursday (Feb. 11) at 10:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT) at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to discuss the search for gravitational waves, which zoom through space at the speed of light. [...]
...LIGO has detected gravitational waves produced by the merger of two black holes. The discovery will be published Thursday in the prestigious journal Nature...
We may even have seen a simulation of colliding black holes at the Super Bowl (halftime)...
Two "black forces" did collide in the form of Beyonce (and her all-female, all-black dancers dressed in black) and Bruno Mars (and his all-male, all-black dancers dressed in black) aggressively walking toward each other from opposite sides of the stage for a dance-off... where a black hole-like vortex ignited and released energy ("gravitational waves").
Planet X/Nine, gravitational waves, perhaps to be followed by a confirmation of CERN's possible LHC discovery announced back in December potentially having to do with dark matter, hidden dimensions, and/or... graviton. Also the issue of the blinking star/alien megastructure but that's for another time...
Hello from the other side... Seems we are entering a period of dark and heavy stuff coming out of the "Underworld". Are you ready?
Tema anterior
French Revolutionary Time officially began on November 24, 1793 although conceptual work around the system had been going on since the 1750s. The French manufactured clocks and watches showing both decimal time and standard time on their faces (allowing for both conversion and confusion). These clock faces were spectacularly weird.
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