Dates Are Difficult Written by Mike James    Article Index Dates
Are Difficult Hot Dates Date Bugs   Hot Dates  So far so good.
Time is fairly easy as long as you are working with intervals of
a few days. Things really only start to get complicated when you
start to work with dates specified in day, month and year.  The
reason is that at this level there is very little regularity in
the way time is measured and it is the definition of the month
that makes things complicated. The month is not a fixed period
of time. If I say that I will finish a project in a month - what
exactly do I mean?  There are 7 days to a week and that’s about
as simple and regular as it gets. A year is 365 days, which is
the time it takes the earth to go around the sun – to be more
precise it actually takes 365 days, 5 hr, 48 min, and 45.5 sec
on average to go round.  Because the orbital period of the earth
isn’t an exact number of rotations about its axis we have to
tinker with the number of days in a year to correct the calendar
ever