Koulus Calendar
Standard academic and civic timekeeping method.
Common Knowledge
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Timekeeping
The Koulus Calendar (abbreviated as Kc) is the standard calendar used by academic institutions across the continent, and often used by civic and government institutions in the broadly southern and eastern regions. Its adoption began following the discovery of the Koulus Dossier on Marraskut 2, 612 Kc, which was used to reconstruct the Predecessor's timekeeping system.
Marking the date of the last outside communication (contained within the dossier) as the first day of the calendar on "Year Zero," many groups replaced their calendars with the Koulus system. The Koulus Calendar had better time drifting correction than the multitude of systems that were being used at that period, and offered a new way to standardize timekeeping for post-Shift civilizations.
Structure
The Koulus Calendar is based on the Predecessors' "Ghoran" Calendar system. It divides the 314 days of the year into 12 months, and each month is given 26 days each. Two days do not fall under any month, and instead belong to a period known as the "Intermission." This period consists of the day before a new year begins, and the day of the year's beginning; both correlating with the Autumn Equinox. Intermission is largely an artifact of the old Ghoran calendar, but was kept to preserve consistency with further discoveries in Predecessor history.
Months are further separated into weeks of 7 days each, beginning on "Ensidi" and ending on "Sunnudi." The days of the academic Koulus calendar are largely lifted from Predecessor names found in the Lesser Basin, but are usually named differently between groups that use the system.
A day is split into 20 hours, 70 minutes each. These timekeeping units were directly copied from Predecessor figures, but includes complications that initially slowed the widespread adoption of this clock. They require the resetting of clocks by roughly a minute and 30 seconds at the end of each week, and while this is largely accepted today, there are still ongoing debates to define new subdivisions of time.
An additional quirk of the Koulus system is the presence of "Leap Years." These were included in the Ghoran system to account for calendar inaccuracy and resulting date drift. In the current Koulus calendar, an additional day is added to the month of Jesu every 7 years for similar error correction.
Date Formatting
As a consequence of replacing many calendar systems, there are several recognized ways to format a date by Koulus standards. These include:
Southern Standard/Eastern Standard - DMY/MDY
The Southern Standard is the most observed standard, formatting days in order of Day, Month, and Year. The Eastern Standard comes at a close second for most-utilized dating standard, and structures dates in the reverse order. Both often replace month names with their sequence number, and both tend to utilize the 20-hour clock (especially in the south. Time may be formatted through the "full clock" (20-hour format) or "half clock" (10-hour format) representations.
Central Standard - YMD/YDM
The Central Standard(s) are less widely adopted, but still recognized by the majority of standards guides. Regions utilizing this formatting have often been recent adopters of the Koulus calendar in the central regions of the continent, but have not yet adopted the standardized clock system. Studies into this correlation are ongoing.
The return of digitized technology has brought new kinds of date formatting in certain circles, primarily in the form of appended seconds passed in the observed minute for digitized forms of dates and time in computer systems. A common form of date formatting for digital computers and infomats includes dividing the date into two "IDs" separated by a bit declarer. The first ID is the month and day, and the second ID is the year. For instance, a date of 4 Takvtik, 986 would be represented as "044.986". This formatting is useful for easy referencing in digital systems, yet concerns have arisen due to its similarity in structure to other data-handling systems like network queries and statistical engines.