Android apps

In the past I've written about a lot of iOS apps. I did not write about Android apps simply because I didn't have an Android device. But I got a Motorola Moto G some time ago, so I might as well write about Android apps now.

Spring break

The vernal equinox arrives tonight at 04:29:51 UT (57467.18740). That's 9:30 pm on Saturday night here in California. It means that I am officially on Spring Break, so I'll have more time to post here for the next week, if I don't get called for jury duty. It also means that holidays are coming for all my Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Jewish relatives.

Eliminate time zones, while we're at it

Someone just edited the Wikipedia article on Swatch Internet Time to add a link to this TechRepublic article from from last year. The article doesn't say anything new, but it does talk about the problems with time zones and Daylight Saving Time that Internet Time was supposed to solve, which happens to be apropos to the DST post I wrote yesterday.

The real leap day

This year, 2016, is a leap year in the Gregorian calendar, so we had an extra day inserted last month. It is usually thought that this day is inserted at the end of the month, since the last day is the 29th day of February. However, the leap day is actually inserted on the 24th day! Let me explain...

10 hours a day, 10 days a week

I now have a decimal clock with 10 hours and French Republican wall calendar with 10 days a week. Instead 24/7 I can do 10/10!

As you can tell from the position of the hands, it's really a standard clock with a faux decimal face, so the hour hand goes around twice a day and the other hands like usual, but it looks cool. I used a gift card from my secret Santa to get the clock from Cafe Press and bought the calendar from Etsy. You can see more pictures on Twitter.

Duodi 22 Pluviôse an CCXXIV à 9 heures 53 minutes décimales t.m.P.
MJD 57429.947

Leap day

The autumnal equinox comes at MJD 56923.10331 (Tuesday, 2014-09-23 02:28:46 UT) in the Northern Hemisphere. Because that is 366 days after the previous one, the day before, 56922 (this Monday, Sept. 22), is a leap day in the French Republican Calendar. There are usually five complementary days at the end of the Republican year, sometimes collectively called Sansculottides, but this year there is a sixth complementary day, which is why the Republican leap year is called sextile. This day was called Fête de la révolution (Festival of the Revolution), commemorating the French Revolution.

Some people convert modern French Republican Calendar dates by using a rule like the Gregorian calendar, which usually has leap years every four years. This makes it easier to calculate, and is probably what the French would have eventually done, had they kept their calendar, but they did not. By this rule, 56922 (Mon., Sept. 22) is not leap day but actually New Year's Day, the first day of the month of Vendémiaire in the 223rd year of the Republic.

Leap day or New Year's Day, either way it's cause to celebrate!

Quartidi 4^e jour complémentaire an CCXXII à 2 heures 95 minutes décimales t.m.P.

MJD 56920.289

Almanach national de France

I found a copies of the Almanach national de France on the Bibliothèque nationale de France web site. The edition for the second year of the Republican Calendar (l'an deuxieme), 1793-94, includes astronomical tables with decimal times. You can also see the times for the equinoxes and solstices and the phases of the moon written out.

For example, here is the Republican Calendar month of Nivose, in nouvelles heures, or "new times". It says

Solstice á 3 heures 20 minutes 64 secondes. HIVER.

Dernier Quartier á 5 h. 28 m.  Premier Quartier á 7 h. 10 m.

Nouvelle Lune á 9 h. 92 m.    Pleine Lune á 1 h. 53. min.

Hiver is winter. The phases (top to bottom then left to right) are last quarter, new moon, first quarter, full moon.

As I have pointed out before, I usually see decimal times today written with colons, although using colons was not common back then, but rather h and m. Using a decimal mark (which is the comma in French) would make more sense. Even today it is common in French to use h and m with standard time. Here you see a decimal time for the winter solstice written out in full with hours, minutes and seconds, corresponding to 3.2064 decimal hours, and the rest abbreviated, corresponding to 5.28, 9.92, 7.10 and 1.53 decimal hours.  Where there is room, minutes are abbreviated as min., or m. where there is not.

Therefore, I prefer using the old-style French notation, as shown here.

I can tell that most of the times are "true time", or local apparent solar time, which varies throughout the year in relation to mean time, and is shown by sundials. The last column shows when true solar noon occurs in local mean time. All times are relative to Paris.

Quartidi 14 Fructidor an CCXXII à 10 h. 84 m. t.m.P.
MJD 56900.077

Bonne année!

Today at 20:44 Universal Time (56557.8638), 8h 70m Paris mean decimal time, summer officially ends and fall begins in the Northern Hemisphere.  It was also on this date in 1792 the the First Republic was declared in Paris during the French Revolution. This marked the beginning of what was soon to be known as the Republican Era, which was to replace the Common Era of Anno Domini.  Each year of the new era began on the autumnal equinox.  The year was divided into 12 months of exactly 30 days, with five or six extra days at the end of the year treated as holidays. Instead seven-day weeks, each month was divided into three décades of ten days each. Each day was divided into ten hours, each decimal hours into 100 minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 seconds. Decimal time never caught on, although clocks were made and some used it for a while.  The astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace had a decimal watch and used decimal time in his work, and to this day astronomers still use decimal time to date the observations of stars and other objects, which became the inspiration for Star Trek's stardates. The ten-day weeks were abandoned in 1802, and the rest of the calendar was abolished by Napoléon in 1806. Events during the French Revolution are still referred to by their Republican calendar dates, and lobster thermidor gets its name from the 11th month. 

The Gregorian date, September 22, 2013, begins the year 222 of the Republican Era, the 1st day of the month of Vendémiaire.

MJD 56557.330

iPhone and iPad apps

Apps in this post:

CalRep by Jacques Lafon (MuppetJack)

Calendrier républicain by Hachette Livre

TI:ME by Alexander Clauss

Geek Time Pro by reizverstaerker medienwerkstatt OG

I have more apps for iPhone and iPad. Since I've been posting about the French Republican Calendar, I'll post about those first. I've talked earlier about Calendrier, Salut et Fraternité for iPhone, Salut et Fraternité for iPad and revol-di. Now we have some more.

CalRep by Jacques Lafon (MuppetJack) is a universal app (meaning it is designed for both iPhone and iPad). Originally released October 2, 2012 (56202, CCXXI/1/11), version 2.1 November 5, 2012 (56236, CCXXI/2/15).  It is free, with $1.99 in-app purchase for the "complete version".  I don't know what that means, and I'm not going to pay before I find out. In addition to the current date, you can convert between Gregorian and Republican dates for any year after I. I found one bug: all the Roman numerals for years are wrong on the selector, e.g. the current year 221 shows CCXX, although on the iPhone (but not iPad) the year is also correctly shown next to the picture. It starts in 1792 as "Yr (1) / Yr I (2) / Yr II (3)…" It sends daily alerts, which I like, and you can set what time to receive them, although for some reason you can't get them before 9 am, which is late for me. The dates are calculated according to what I call the continuous rule,  which is the fixed rule that leap days are added before (not after) most years divisible by 4, which is continuous with leap days during the Revolution, although those were determined by the equinox rather than a fixed rule, so sometimes it's a day off from the equinox date in some years. It does not show the decimal time, but it does show for each date the month's calendar girl and a picture of the rural calendar name, although for today it shows the barbel fish instead of the cornflower (barbeaux)! (See previous post.) It also has links to Wikipedia articles, although some of them don't exist, as such. Unlike some of the others, it does not show decimal time.

Update: The CalRep app is no more. It has been updated to version 3.0 and renamed UniCal - Universal Calendar, with a new icon, and now includes a bunch of other calendars, including Chinese, Mayan, Hebrew, Islamic and Persian. (What, no Julian/Orthodox?) The year number bug has been fixed.  Also, you can now get alerts as early as 5 am, although it does not always work for me.  The years appear to begin on the equinox.  I just noticed that only half the day-names appear; every other day says "Free Version", so now I guess I know what the difference is.  Maybe that's why I'm only getting half the daily notifications. 56477.131 (Sextidi 16 Messidor an CCXXI à 1 heure 37 minutes décimales t.m.P.)

Calendrier républicain by Hachette Livre is also a free universal app, released on September 3, 2012 (56173, CCXX/12/17).  It converts between Gregorian and Republican dates, and also converts French day names (like Barbeaux) to dates, although you have to scroll through an unsorted list of 366 names! However, like revol-di, it only works for dates during the Revolution, itself. But you can use it to find current dates if you add 220 to the year. It also does not show decimal time.

TI:ME by Alexander Clauss is a 99¢ universal app, released November 2, 2012 (56233). It displays the current time in any of the following formats: decimal, local standard (24-hour, 12-hour or AM/PM), standard in other timezones, Braille, hex, octal, Swatch Internet Time (.beat), NATO DTG, trig (degrees or radians), or with numbers represented by symbols on the periodic table of elements. There are various settings for each clock.

Geek Time Pro by reizverstaerker medienwerkstatt OG is a 99¢ iPhone app, released August 9, 2011 (55782). It displays the time in binary coded sexagesimal (lights or 1/0), binary coded decimal (BCD), hex time or decimal time.

Duodi 22 Prairial an CCXXI à 2 heures 42 minutes décimales t.m.P.

MJD 56453.236

French Republican Twitter

Twitter links in this post:
@Sansculotides
@JacobinCalendar
@DecimalTime

I have been following @JacobinCalendar on Twitter for a while. The Jacobins were a radical element of the French Revolution, who favored the French Republican Calendar. Unfortunately, they are known for the Reign of Terror, and were overthrown on 9 Thermidor Year II. Anyway, this feed generates two or three tweets a day giving the Republican Calendar date. For instance, today one says:

Today's date according to the French Revolutionary Calendar: Meadow/Cornflower/221

Meadow refers to the Republican month Prairial, which comes from the French word prairie, which means the same as in English, but it can be translated as "meadow", although then the month name should then be Meadowal... Cornflower refers to the so-called rural calendar, in which each day of the year was named for a plant, animal, agricultural tool or mineral, to replace the old saints' days. In French, today is called Barbeau, which is cornflower in English, although some sites translate it as barbel, because this is also the French word for this fish, but animal names are only used for quintidis, the fifth day of the 10-day décade, and today is Primidi, the first day of the third décade.

Of course, the usual way of giving the date is by day of the month, which would be 21 Prairial of Year CCXXI. I started tweeting dates like this, but I just discovered that someone was already doing so. Since the beginning of last Nivôse, the first month of winter, @Sansculotides has been tweeting the date every day like this:

Today is primidi 21 Prairial in the year of the Republic CCXXI, celebrating the cornflower. pic.twitter.com/I1O1FoWs62

This seems to be according to Paris time, however, since it's about 8 hours ahead for me.

Duodi 22 Prairial an CCXXI à 1 heure 84 minutes décimales t.m.P.
MJD 56453.177
@DecimalTime

Prairial app for Windows 8

Prairial by Laurent Rodier is a Windows 8/RT app that converts between the French Republican and Gregorian calendars. It displays the usual calendar girls for each month, and can display an entire month on one screen. It has live tile support, so it shows the date on your Windows Start screen. It also converts between standard and decimal times. It appears to display the current decimal time on a basic analog clock with 10 at the top. Since I don't have Windows 8 or RT, I have not tried it, but it's available for $1.49 in the Windows Market. It just happens that Prairial is the current month, the last month of spring.

Duodi 22 Prairial an CCXXI à 1 heure 24 minutes décimales t.m.P.
MJD 56453.117

Still here

It's the 21st of December (56282), or 13.0.0.0.0 in the Mayan long-count calendar, the day the world is supposed to end, and yet, here I am.  I know I haven't posted since the equinox, and it's now the solstice, but I just finished finals so I have a bit of free time.  Not sure what to write about; the "fiscal cliff", gun control, The Hobbit?

No point writing about what didn't happen, i.e. the "end of the world".  Someone asked me how I thought it will end.  Well, literally it will end billions of years from now when the sun expands into a red giant.  Of course, all life on earth will likely be long dead by then, since global warming will cook the planet in a few hundred million years.  This is not the global warming everyone talks about, which is caused by humans and will make things difficult for future generations, but caused by the activity of the sun increasing over eons, and makes the arguments over Kyoto look insignificant.

It's funny to hear people talking about how to survive the sun going red giant billions of years from now, when human beings aren't going to be here.  Even if the earth remained inhabitable until then, we cannot expect our species to last that long.  That's longer than life has already existed!  Earth is about four and a half billion years old.  The Cambrian Period, which is when animals with hard parts first appeared, was a half-billion years ago, and in another half-billion years there may be no life left, so forget five billion years.  But species typically last hundreds of thousands or millions of years.  Whatever happens to us, our environment will be different than the one we initially evolved in, so we will continue to adapt and evolve into new species, at the very best, or we'll simply go extinct, without any descendants.  In any event, Homo sapiens will longer exist.

Whether we do go extinct, or what we might evolve into, I have no clue.

MJD 56283.200

Bonne année!

The autumnal equinox arrives today at 6h 23m Paris mean decimal time (56192.617) and that means it's Primidi 1 Vendémiaire l'an CCXXI, the first day of year 221 of the French Republican Calendar.  Even if you use a different method to calculate the date, you'll probably be celebrating today.  So happy new year!

MJD 56192.385

Mouvement souverainiste du Québec

I received the following:

I was thinking, as you know I live in Canada, and interestingly I now live in Montreal, Quebec. As you may or may not know, this has always been a hot spot of cultural debate (i.e Anglos vs Francos) and quite frankly the Francos are winning. In fact it wouldn't be to much a stretch of the imagination to say Quebec may form an independent country by next year. Whether I stay or not is another question, but I was thinking, if Quebec goes rouge (sic), why don't they re-install La calendrier Française Révolutionnaire as well as Temps FR (20hrs per day!) it would truly make Quebec a distinct society.

My answer is that Quebec was a British territory at the time of the Revolution, so it never used the Republican Calendar nor decimal time (10 hours, not 20).  France, itself, has not used the calendar in two centuries (except for a few radicals briefly in Paris in 1871) and never really accepted decimal time.  Given that 24/60/60 time is universal in every country on earth, not just Anglo ones, and the Gregorian calendar nearly so, especially in Catholic countries, it is highly improbable that there would be any interest whatsoever.

However, I am not Québécois and have only been there once, so I do not wish to presume to speak for them.  Please feel free to comment below.

Quartidi 14 Messidor an CCXX à 6 heures 82 minutes décimales t.m.P.
MJD 56111.676

The equinox marches on

Spring has officially arrived in the Northern Hemisphere.  Not that you'd notice here in the Western US, where it's unseasonably cold.  Of course, in the East it's unseasonably hot, and in the middle the combination is causing tornadoes.

In fact, spring arrived last night, at 10:14:09 pm my time, Pacific Daylight, on the 19th day of March by the Gregorian calendar (56006.21816).  That's the 20th of March for most of the world, but this is still the earliest equinox in over a century.  Part of the reason for this is that there was a leap day last month, which pushes the date back a day.  The next one, in 2013, will come nearly six hours later, and so on until the next leap year in 2016, when it will again jump back a day.  In fact, it will jump back slightly more than a day.  It continue to slip earlier and earlier every leap year, until 2100, when we will skip a leap year.  The reason we have leap years is to keep the equinox from arriving later and later every year.  The reason we skip leap years is to keep the equinox from arriving too early.  The earliest vernal equinox this century will be in 2096 (86686.5848) after which it will advance nearly six hours each year until 2103 (89243.265).  In 2104 the leap year cycle will start again, so the equinox date will again go back a day, or about 18 hours before 2103 (89608.509). 

For the rest of this century, spring will arrive more and more often on the 19the day of March in Pacific Daylight Time, instead of the 20th.  Then it will arrive on the 20th every year from 2099 to 2135.  Of course, it will always arrive earlier in the Eastern Hemisphere, often on the 21st day of March, as it's supposed to.  The Romans, it's said, originally fixed the equinox on the 25th day of March, as Julius Caesar noted on his calendar, but by the fourth century it had slipped to the 21st, and the latter date is the one that Pope Gregory noted on his calendar, by which time it had slipped by between 9 and 10 days, so he dropped 10 days, although it probably would have been more accurate to have dropped only 9, since it usually falls on the 20th in Europe.  At least it's closer in Asia and Australia.  (I know that doesn't quite add up, since the date should have slipped only 3 days in the first four centuries rather than 4, but I don't know the reason for the discrepancy.)

There is a good graph of the March equinox's wanderings on Wolfram.

MJD 56006.974

Astronomers gone bad

Last week astronomer Phil Plait posted on his Bad Astronomy blog an article about leap day. In it he stated:

The year is not exactly 365.25 days long. Our official day is 86,400 seconds long. I won’t go into details on the length of the year itself (you can read a wee bit about it here), but the year we now use is called a Tropical Year and it is 365.242190419 days long. With malice aforethought — my calculator won’t hold that many digits — let’s round it to 365.2421904... There is no official rule for leap days with cycles bigger than 400 years. I think this is extremely ironic, because the amount we are off every 400 years is almost exactly 1/8th of a day! So after 3200 years, we’ve had 8 of those 400 year cycles...This whole 400-year thingy was started in the year 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII. That’s close enough to the year 1600 (which was a leap year!), so in my book, the year 4800 should not be a leap year.

Except that he's wrong.  He was also wrong when he posted this originally four years ago. I posted a correction in the comments then, and I've done so again now, but obviously he does not read the comments. The reason he is wrong is because he's using the wrong value for the year. The document that Gregory issued establishing his calendar is called the Inter gravissimas.  It clearly states that the reform is intended to fix the date of the vernal equinox, upon which Easter is based.  The year defined by equinoxes is not the same as the Tropical Year mentioned above, but a slightly larger value between 365.24237 and 365.24238.  This is closer to the average Gregorian year of 365.2425 days.  Using the equinoctial figure, it will take about 8000 years before it's off by one day, which would be in the tenth millennium.  Due to the variability of the equinoctial year, we cannot even predict its value that far in the future.  The way it's trending now, I could even be much further in the future.

He is not alone.  This error is often repeated by astronomers.  It is sometimes traced back to John Herschel, but during the Revolution French astronomers calculated that the mean year was between 365.2422 and 365.24225 days and proposed an adjustment after 4000 years.  But none of them were using the vernal equinox, as Gregory did. The correct figure may be found in Wikipedia and others.  Anybody can figure it out themselves simply by taking the average between the equinoxes of any two years.

MJD 55994.238

Leap Day

I know I haven't posted in a long time, as I've been busy, but I have some time now, and this date happens only once every four years, so I won't let it pass without comment.

The truth is, calling the last day of February "leap day" is a relatively recent practice. Although we today count days from the start of the month, our Gregorian calendar was originally a slight modification of the Julian calendar, itself based by Julius Caesar on the earlier Roman calendar, which counted days backwards.  Thus, the first day of each month was called the Calends or Kalends of that month, so the last day of February would be known as the day before (Latin Pridie) the Calends of March.  (This is where we get the word "calendar".)  The rest of the days in the last half of each month were likewise counted down to the Calends of the following month.  The Romans included the Calends itself as the last day in their countdown.

Caesar did not insert the leap day at the end of February, but on the 24th day, which in Roman counting was the sixth day counting down to the Calends of March.  Thus, in leap years two days were both counted as the sixth day before Calends, which we would now call the 24th and 25th days of the 29-day month.  (Sometimes the 24th was considered the extra day and sometimes the 25th.)

Consequently, someone born on the last day of February in a leap year, i.e. February 29, would not have celebrated only once every four years, but rather every year on the last day of the month, which we call February 28 in common years.  Since the extra day was counted as the same as the 24th, as though it were one 48-hour-long day, anyone born on the leap day, i.e. February 25, would celebrate their birthday in common years on February 24, the sixth day before the Calends of March.  Likewise, the Roman Catholic Church recognized February 24 as the feast of St. Matthias in common years, but February 25 in leap years, up until as recently as 1970.  Other feasts near the end of February were likewise shifted.  I believe that this is still practiced by those using the Julian calendar, i.e. Orthodox churches, although in this century Julian calendar dates fall 13 days behind those in the Gregorian calendar.

Common year:
February                      March
 22  23  24  25  26  27  28   1...
VIII VII VI  V   IV  III II   K


Leap year:

February                          March
 22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29   1...
VIII VII VI  VI  V   IV  III II   K

So in actuality, the leap day occurred on Saturday, February 25, rather than today.  There are a number of articles on the Internet today about leap years, so I'll link to How the Quest for the Perfect Calendar Accidentally Created February 30.

MJD 55987.300

Bonne année!

The autumnal equinox occurs on MJD 55827.378 (2011 Sept. 23 09:04 UTC) or 9h13 in the morning, Paris mean time. Therefore, according to the rule in effect during the French Revolution, MJD 55827 (23 September in the Gregorian calendar) will be the first day of year CCXX in the Republican Calendar.

According to the rule used by Brumaire, including their iPhone and iPad apps, MJD 55827 is also the first day of the 220th Republican year. The day before, MJD 55826 (22 September), is a leap day according to Brumaire, but not according to the official calendar rule. Dates prior to this are different by one day, but with the start of the new year, dates will be the same by both rules until 2014.

The first month of the Republican calendar is Vendémiaire, so New Year's Day is 1 Vendémiaire. Happy new year!

MJD 55824.627

Salut et Fraternité app for iPad by Brumaire

Finally, people are starting to make apps formatted for iPad.  Salut et Fraternité for iPad by Brumaire is a port of the Salut et Fraternité app for iPhone, which displays the current French Republican calendar date and decimal time, and allows you to convert between Republican and Gregorian dates. Unfortunately, instead of simply updating the original app for iPad, they made it a separate app, forcing you to pay $1.99 for both.  The iPad version is pretty much the same as the original, but looks better on the bigger screen.  Also, instead of a separate tab for the decimal time watch, you select a setting to have it displayed on the main tab.  However, for some reason the season images don't appear for me on the "Convert" tab after I turn them on.  If you already have the iPhone version, you might want to simply use that on your iPad, rather than pay twice, even if it does look a bit crappy, although another two bucks at least won't set you back much.

MJD 55783.913

Revol-di app for iPhone by Kodaski.fr

Revol-di 1.0 by Kodaski.fr was released 2011 January 20 (55581) and is the third French Republican Calendar app for the iPhone.  The name is taken from an early proposal for the first day of the décade, better known as Primidi.  Unlike Calendrier and Salut et Fraternité, this one is free.  Unfortunately, like the others, it is formatted only for the iPhone (and iPod Touch) and not the iPad.  (It's been over a year, why doesn't everybody recognize the iPad?)  Also unlike the others, it is targeted at genealogists, so it only converts dates during the revolutionary period when the calendar was in effect, 1792-1805 (JD 2375840-2380688), and does not convert more recent dates, nor does it display decimal time.  At least it does not have to worry about which method to use for determining modern dates.

It does have features the others don't, however.  For one, you can make notes, which are stored under the (Gregorian) date they are made.  This is useful for recording birth dates and such during the Revolution.  The entire notepad may then be shared via email.  Under "Information", facsimiles of the laws relating to the Republican Calendar are available, in French.  (Gregorian dates are also displayed in French.)  "Historical context" gives information about the calendar.  "The calendar months Illustrations" shows period paintings of calendar girls.  There is a "Help" section and four different wallpapers to choose from.

MJD 55710.444

Nonidi 9 Prairial an CCXIX à 4^hd 50^md t.m.P.