Ancestral habits and a very early tradition have led us to preserve,
as the unit of time, a unit connected with the earth's movement; and
the unit to-day adopted is, as we know, the sexagesimal second of mean
time. This magnitude, thus defined by the conditions of a natural
motion which may itself be modified, does not seem to offer all the
guarantees desirable from the point of view of invariability. It is
certain that all the friction exercised on the earth--by the tides,
for instance--must slowly lengthen the duration of the day, and must
influence the movement of the earth round the sun. Such influence is
certainly very slight, but it nevertheless gives an unfortunately
arbitrary character to the unit adopted.





.....and not only that, it takes a hell of a big dog to weigh a ton!


what was the question, again?