(2003-12-31) Meta Time

Bonus Meta Data question Of The Day: what time is it? Unbeknown to most people there is not a single accepted way of telling the time, but several different scales running concurrently. The differences are usually small, but the scales can be as much as 30 seconds apart and the gap between them is growing steadily... This means GPS time is now running 13 seconds ahead of coordinated universal time - which includes all added leap seconds and to which most clocks on Earth are set - but is some 19 seconds behind international atomic time, which is based on atomic clocks and ignores leap seconds.