Grandes Marées: France Tides

A tide app that explains the tide. Any app will give you the time of the next low tide. This one also gives you something to say about it: why that coefficient, why the tides run so high in September, why the sea comes back faster than anyone expects. Enough to carry a whole dinner, and to hold forth over Monday's coffee. Sixty entries, thirty-six diagrams, three levels of reading, from a text you read aloud with a child to the astronomical calculation. All of it free. THE SKY ABOVE YOUR PORT, THIS MINUTE The screen is not decoration: it is the real sky above the port you are looking at, at the time it is. The sun rises and sets at its own hour, the moon climbs at tonight's phase, and the water reflects both. At night the screen is brightest when the moon is full — which is to say when the tides are strongest. THE COEFFICIENT, AND WHY IT IS WHAT IT IS France measures the strength of a…