oops

[moominmolly]

I was born in a leap year, which blinded me to the fact that this calendar converter really does take the autumn equinox into account when calculating dates in the French Revolutionary Calendar. (It doesn't have leap years.) As penance, I will note that this makes me a daylily.

A thousand apologies to those of you I inconvenienced by leading you to believe that you were related to a slightly different mundane object than you actually are. topaz_munro, you're still Bacchante, apparently, according to the calendar converter (I didn't look at it before), and so you still get a drink.

Comments

[spike.livejournal.com]

If I did the math right, I'm a knife!

[ladytabitha.livejournal.com]

Dammit, I am going to spend ALL MORNING trying to figure this all out.  Does it only matter if you were born leapishly?

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Nope! The calendar converter is always right, it seems. It's just that the FRC doesn't do leap years -- they achieve the same end by making sure that the first day of the year always falls on the equinox. It's just that the leap year is what screwed me up!

[cuthalion.livejournal.com]

They do do leap years by adding an extra holiday in at the end of the year, where there's 5 or 6 depending!

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Yes, they add days in, but it's not as mechanical as our leap years. I should have said "doesn't do leap years like we do". I think that system is a lot cooler, actually!

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Oh, so that's what "Normal year" means -- it tells you whether the date you're looking up falls in a leap year.

Alas, November 12, 1970, is Duodi di Decade III in the month of Brumaire -- that's day 22, right? I was then born on the Day of Acerola. I guess there are worse things than being good for colds!

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Okay, now I'm going nuts. When I look at the calendar converter and put in November 12, 1970 (I just did it 3 times), it tells me "Decade III, jour de Primidi". Is this a CONSPIRACY?

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Ohhhhh, no, I figured it out.

Put in 11:59 as the time and look up the conversion.
Now put in 12:00 and look it up.

Apparently the French Revolutionary Calendar marked the beginning of a new day at noon, not midnight. I was born at about 10:30pm on November 12 and was reflexively adding that time each time I did the conversion. That puts me on jour de Duodi.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Ohhhh. Poo!

Well, I will still buy you a drink.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

PS: what kind of self-respecting calendar starts a day at noon? I'm not sure I believe that. I will continue to consider you Bacchante, and amber_phoenix bread.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

I can't find any actual support for this -- nobody outright says whether they started their day at noon or midnight, which leads me to believe it was midnight, and the calendar converter is just being silly.

[dancingwolfgrrl.livejournal.com]

Ha! I throw off the stereotypical-for-flutists "nightengale" in favor of the hawthorne. I'd rather be a tree, anyway ;)

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

Neat!

[dancingwolfgrrl.livejournal.com]

Also, I apparently threw off my ability to spell "nightingale."

[nitouche.livejournal.com]

Whee -- I'm a laurel. I *am* grateful to have missed being a vache by 2 days :)

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

I was born in january, so my name-day should still be the same, right?

[signsoflife.livejournal.com]

You can skip the calendar converter completely and do it by inspection from the days chart once you know if the previous autumnal equinox was a "late" equinox, and, if you were born between feb 28 and sep. 21, if the previous february was a "long" february.

If you have a "normal" (not really) equinox and a "normal" february, you can just use the dates given at the top of each revolutionary month and count forward -- e.g., if you were born on March 23rd, you could start at the top of Germinal and say, 21, 22, 23, and find the Day of the Asparagus.

If you were born after a "late" equinox, you add a day to the date given at the top of each month -- so for March 23rd after a late equinox, you'd count 22, 23 and come up with the day of the Plane Tree.

If you were born in between a February 29th and Sept. 22, you can just count forward using the february 29th for Ventose, but for Germinal onwards, you subtract a day from the date given at the beginning of the month -- for March 23rd, you count 20, 21, 22, 23, and wind up on the day of the Tulip.

And for the combination of a late equinox and a leap year, they cancel out.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

This is how I was doing it, minus the (obvious) leap-year calculation. I looked at the converter once, forgot about leap year, and assumed it was wrong, so I just shifted the days on the chart. Even now, it seems easier to me to do it that way.

[dda.livejournal.com]

French Revolutionary Calendar. (It doesn't have leap years.)

The wiki entry seemed to say it did: Five extra days (six in leap years) were national holidays at the end of every year.
La Fête de la Révolution "Revolution Day" on Sept 22 or 23 (Leap years)

However, they also point out that the calculation of same was difficult at times.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

It doesn't have leap years in the way we think about them (added in every 4 years, more or less) -- instead, they fix the 1st day of the year at the equinox, have 12 months of 30 days each, and then fill in the days left until the next equinox with the festival days. Sometimes, they have to fill in with one extra. However, they don't have the years-divisible-by-100 rule, since the calendar was self-correcting, and they CERTAINLY don't line up with our leap years.

Is that a better accounting of my errors?

[dda.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see now! Thank you for the explanation. I saw the bit in the wiki about the "fixed arithmetic rule" but your explanation is much clearer.

I think I'm the day of Wild Ginger, since the equinox starts on the 23rd of the previous year. If my math is screwed up, I'm buckthorn instead.

[amber-phoenix.livejournal.com]

*sigh* I thought I got to be bread, but then I put in the time. Glasswort! At least its funky cool looking.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

I think the time thing is bunk! You get to be bread if you like (though glasswort is pretty cool).

[armoire-man.livejournal.com]

Wowsers...

I think I've finally got it straight. It would seem that my daughter and I are billygoats, and my beloved spouse is lichen.

[moonshadow.livejournal.com]

Yay! I really am a lentil after all! I knew it!

I am so amused to have inspired this obsession

[crouchback.livejournal.com]

I just used Emacs's calendar trickery, which aparently does not account for the time of day thing.

I am apparently a Hellebore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellebore) instead of Broccoli.

Hellebore sounds a lot more interesting than Broccoli.