Image by AZRainmanEarly in 2012, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) will meet in Geneva to talk about time. Specifically they will be considering a proposal to change the way we keep time, away from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and towards the more precise time kept by hundreds of atomic clocks around the world. Why are they considering this? Simply because determining “clock” time by the passing of the sun over any point of the Earth’s surface is inaccurate.

Evolution has tuned us into the rising and setting of the sun and it's tempting to assume that the Earth (and its daily rotation) is constant. It’s not. More . . .