It's about time

I subscribe to an email list for precise timekeeping. It is possible to spend about $200 and wind up with a clock that is accurate to one second every hundred years or so. Surplus cellular equipment is a wonderful resource... This cri de coeur came in from one of the members working on a project:

That was worth about four hours research and going to bed with a head-ache. Learned all about "Julian Day" and "Modified Julian Day", which it turns out has nothing to do with the Julian Calendar. (Did you know that time started at high noon on January 1, 4713 BC. ?) Finally discovered a code snippet in Tom Van Baak's "C" code repository that will do the conversion. (Thanks, Tom.)

A pox upon leap years, un-leap centuries, re-leap 4th centuries, Roman Numerals, modulus 7 weeks that do not align with the year boundary, months with no regular modulus structure, and no year 0.

Who sold us this?

Makes you appreciate the decimal time "Star Date" system used on Startrek.

And do not get me started on Unix timekeeping. Heh... The more precise we try to get, the fuzzier things turns out to be.