Tom Lane wrote:
Bruno Wolff III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Wikipedia gives 365.242189670 days (86400 seconds) as the length of
the mean solar year in 2000. To give you some idea of how constant
that values is, Wikipedia claims that 2000 years ago the mean solar
year was about 10 seconds longer. Using the above value I get there
is an average of 2629743 seconds in a month.
And yet another option is to note that in the Gregorian calendar there are
400*365+97 days or 400*12 months in 400 years, which gives 2629746 seconds
per month on average.
I like the latter approach, mainly because it gives a defensible rationale for using a particular exact value. With the solar-year approach there's no strong reason why you should use 2000 (or any other particular year) as the reference; and any value you did use would be subject to both roundoff and observational error. With the Gregorian calendar as reference, 2629746 seconds is the *exact* answer, and it's correct because the Pope says so ;-).
(Or, for the Protestants among us, it's correct because the SQL standard specifies use of the Gregorian calendar.)
regards, tom lane
Give or take one day every 4000 years. ;-)
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