Ralphus Principeatus,

    I have that same "eaten up" explanation in the back of my mind.  Leap
Year is not good enough.  I know that the world clock at Greenwich is
synched every night at midnight and I seem to remember this is where it is
made up.  What do the Royal Horologists do when they "synch" those time
keepers?

The Iron Grasshopper


----- Original Message -----
From: "Ralph Walter" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, March 23, 2001 2:36 PM
Subject: Re: Authenticity vs. integrity over Time


> 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
>