I thought my comment was warranted. You didn't. Fine. Good people may agree to differ.

We're that far down in the weeds nobody is interested in our conversation

I think the idea that the time the earth takes to rotate 360° varies and is thus not constant is important and it has consequences that are verifiable to anyone with a mobile phone and GPS.

In terms of science etc I think the idea of a constant should only be used for things that do not change. IE π e and the speed of light in a vacuum.

Obviously I thought it was important or I wouldn't have mentioned it.

As a distraction here's a man in the 1970s with a GPS wondering about the implications of a better organised society

Not sure exactly what you are asking - could you rephrase it for me?

> How much does the rotation of the earth vary, and is it significant enough to warrant this detour in an explanation to a 5-year-old?

ELI5 is not for actual 5 year olds. It's for an intelligent layperson.

Day length fluctuations explains all in a depth that is beyond me.

When I went with my son to Greenwich observatory on the River Thames, London.

We looked at our GPS co-ordinates we found that the zero meridian was 100m or so further east than the observatory. This was explained as being caused by the earth slowing more than anticipate and so the 0° meridian moves further east.

Every so often there is a leap second when this occurs the GPS data resets the zero meridian back to the observatory

I know that muslim scholars decided that muslims in space can track their day/night for fasting based on the time in Mecca.

> The earth spins at a constant rate,

Constant-ish rate.

Great American Gladys West developed her model of the world to take into account variations in the earth's spin to ensure that sat nav is accurate.

Each location has its own local time. This didn't matter for most of history.

Once we had trains there was a need to ensure that clocks were synchronised to ensure that trains departed at the same time for everyone concerned. These times meant there was a need to have standardised time over a large area.

WWI in Germany saw the need to make maximum use of available daylight in factories and this practice of daylight saving was quickly adopted in high latitude locations. In equatorial locations there is no point in daylight saving as sunrise and sunset don't vary much throughout the year.

At this point I'd add OP needs a little neurological insight, if he wants to sleep through the noise.

I used to travel a lot for business. I'd often sleep in noisy hotels. The recommendation then was to play a radio detuned a bit from the station. The dull meaningless noise would mask the external noises and sleep would come easy.

These days I just play Stephen Fry reading Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes".

My audio book app goes to sleep after 20 minutes. If I'm still awake, I hear it play a ping 1 minute before it fades out and pauses. If I then shake my phone - the app detects the shake and resets the timer clock to 20 minutes. I've never heard the second ping

I can't remember where I heard it said, but someone says "If something makes no sense to you, look at the money flow, it will make sense then"

Just heard this massive choon

That word "interpolation" is the trend to dress up old songs in new clothes. This sort of creative endeavour is the sort of thing the Hipgnosis guys are totally across extending the shelf life of their original artists works.

Interpolated into “Players” is “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five, which was released in 1982 and proved to be one of the earliest hits in the history of rap music. Also acknowledged as being interpolated is “Nasty Boy”, a track Biggie Smalls dropped in 1997.

There's a license agreement negotiated. Existing rights are grandfathered in and remain as they are.

It would be a very inept negotiator who didn't carve out performance rights for the songwriter.

The leading company in this field is Hipgnosis founded by Nile Rogers (Chic etc) and a forgotten by me music entrepreneur. Their USP is that most musicians are not entrepreneurs and Hipgnosis buy the rights in exchange for a guaranteed income to the artist.

Hipgnosis are not a record company or music publishing house.

The difference between Hipgnosis and mafia finance is that Hipgnosis has earned the respect and trust of major artists.

There's a current trend in music of reheating old hits and remaking them based on TikTok trends that is the sort of thing Hipgnosis are all over. Promoting their artists and songs

He was never amused by porn star jokes. He was a cool dude he was lead singer for a German thrash metal band

He was German - he was hardly going to be called Gerald Frobisher..

He was great too in Chitty Chitty bang bang.

I knew a German man called Dirk Harder. So you know Germans are different