Tom Lane wrote:
>Bruno Wolff III <bruno@wolff.to> 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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