It was recently reported in the Guardian (UK) that John McCain is NOT a descendant of the 13th century Scottish King, Robert Bruce. McCain's links to Scottish king shot down by experts

Asked by the Guardian to investigate McCain's past, genealogists and medieval historians described the link to Robert the Bruce as "wonderful fiction" and "baloney".

Hmmmm... I was thinking of voting for Robert Bruce, but if he and McCain are not related then this changes everything. Yet, Senator McCain should not feel bad about being outed for NOT being related to a famous Scot. I, too, am NOT related to another famous Scot to whom it was once a family tradition that we were related.

Anyone who is interested in the mechanics of converting from one calendar to another should see Mapping Time by E.G. Richards

[E. G. Richards'] book is a popular account of the calendars of the world and includes simple algorithms for calculating the day of the week of any date, for interconverting dates in a variety of calendars and for calculating the date of Easter. They are all suitable for use with a hand calculator, or if you prefer, you can write a simple computer program which uses them.

The book, which was published in 1999, can purchased from Amazon by going here, but the web-site link listed above will provide links where you can download an ASCII file containing all the algorithms and also download an extended version of Chapters 23 and 25 which contains a detailed discussion together with full derivations of  the formulae in these chapters for interconverting calendars.

For anyone who interested in toying with programming and computer languages the algorithms provided by Richards can be source of a few hours of fun. I used Richards' algorithms as the basis of creating a CalendarFunctions class in VB.NET.

Check out the new PRONI website which was launched in January 2008.  PRONI aims to identify, preserve and make available Northern Ireland's unique archival heritage and community memory. All the information that was available on their old site has been rearranged into a new structure, plus lots of new information has been added!  We hope you find this site user friendly, helpful and informative.

For centuries question of how to calculate the date of Easter has fascinated and frustrated many scholars and mathematicians. This is discussed in this Wikipedia  Computus article.   

Computus (Latin for computation) is the calculation of the date of Easter in the Christian calendar. The name has been used for this procedure since the early Middle Ages, as it was one of the most important computations of the age.

Many years ago I had found the following BASIC program in Sky & Telescope Magazine (see Astronomical Computing, Sky & Telescope March, 1986 and also SkyandTelescope.com - Astro Software - BASIC Programs from Sky & Telescope ):

10 REM    EASTER 
12 REM 
14 INPUT "YEAR ";Y 
16 IF Y<1583 THEN 14 
18 Y1=Y/19 
20 A=INT((Y1-INT(Y1))*19+.001) 
22 B1=Y/100: B=INT(B1) 
24 C=INT((B1-INT(B1))*100+.001) 
26 D1=B/4: D=INT(D1) 
28 E=INT((D1-INT(D1))*4+.001) 
30 F=INT(((B+8)/25)+.001) 
32 G=INT((B-F+1)/3) 
34 H1=(19*A+B-D-G+15)/30 
36 H=INT((H1-INT(H1))*30+.001) 
38 C1=C/4: I=INT(C1) 
40 K=INT((C1-I)*4+.001) 
42 L1=(32+2*E+2*I-H-K)/7 
44 L=INT((L1-INT(L1))*7+.001) 
46 M=INT((A+11*H+22*L)/451) 
48 N1=(H+L-7*M+114)/31: N=INT(N1) 
50 P=INT((N1-N)*31+.001) 
52 N$="APRIL" 
54 IF N=3 THEN N$="MARCH" 
56 PRINT "EASTER IS ON ";N$;P+1 
58 INPUT "ANOTHER (Y OR N) ";Q$ 
60 IF Q$="Y" THEN 14 
62 END

I tried porting this Visual Basic, but I could not get it to yield satisfactory results. I then researched this further and found the following: