Post #2934465
2026-03-12 08:10 UTC
@steko@scholar.social @nfrerebeau@archaeo.social In general R has broad support for calendars but the focus is just that, _calendars_. But these are far too precise for analyses based on longer (archaeological/geological) timescales where e.g. the day difference between Julian and Gregorian is not something you need to worry about! I think it is also useful to distinguish theoretically between calendars, which are a system for describing discrete spans of time, and what I call time scales — measurements of time elapsed.
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@joeroe@archaeo.social 2026-03-12 08:15
@steko@scholar.social @nfrerebeau@archaeo.social I don’t know of any existing work in R or Python that really grapples with timescales as we or earth scientists use them. I also hoped to find it in NetCDF at some point, but it’s still quite cursory. I have a very early-stage draft of paper—which I also promised to share with Nicolas but haven’t got around to it yet!—on concepts of “deep” as opposed to calendric time and its implementation in R. Maybe it would be worth expanding it to look at the Python ecosystem too?