| | International standard date and time notation |
 | | However the 12 months of a year are of some obscure mystic origin and have no real purpose today except that people are used to having them (they do not even describe the current position of the moon). |
 | | In some applications, a date notation is preferred that uses only the year and the day of the year between 001 and 365 (366 in leap years). |
 | | A single leap second 23:59:60 is inserted into the UTC time scale every few years as announced by the International Earth Rotation Service in Paris, to keep UTC from wandering away more than 0.9 s from the less constant astronomical time scale UT1, which is defined by the actual rotation of the earth. |
| www.cl.cam.ac.uk /~mgk25/iso-time.html (2932 words) |