In a message dated 3/23/2001 8:48:17 AM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<< very interesting since a uniform acurate time did not come into being until
 the development of the railroad, requiring a consistant standard time from
 town to town (the converison from half past noon to 12:23)
  >>

AH HAH!!!!!!

At last I've got you all where I want you.  You have stepped PRECISELY into
my cleverly laid trap:

If you look in the almanac, you will see that the earth rotates on its axis
once in 23 hours, 56 minutes, and a few seconds.  However, as we all know,
the day is 24 hours long.  So what happens to the four minutes????   One
possibility is that the 23:56 are divided into 24 equal parts; however, if
that were the case, we wouldn't know about the 4 minutes.  On the other hand,
if every day ended 4 minutes early, but the clocks kept running, we would
eventually have noon in the middle of the night, but that doesn't happen.
The answer--whatever it is, and I don't know it either, and nobody's ever
adequately explained it to me despite having asked this question
intermittently for 20 years--is NOT leap year, which is a function of the
orbit of the earth around the sun (and the accumulation of 4 minutes per day
over the course of four years doesn't work out to 1 day, either.)

So if all you Pinheads are so smart, what happens to the 4 minutes????????
And if you pinheads aren't so smart, you can ask the engineer with his
structurally unsound mortise and tenons.

Ralph

Ralph