Re: [LEAPSECS] Monsters from the id

From: Mark Calabretta <mcalabre_at_ATNF.CSIRO.AU>
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 12:29:20 +1100

On Fri 2006/01/13 18:39:01 CDT, John Cowan wrote
in a message to: LEAPSECS_at_ROM.USNO.NAVY.MIL

>> The situation with the proposed leap hour is quite different. Given
>> that AEST is defined as UTC+1000, and AEDT as UTC+1100, would someone
>> care to speculate, in terms similar to the above, what will happen when
>> a leap hour is inserted?
>
>Perhaps the two scales will be labeled O.S. and N.S., as our anglophone
>antecessors did when switching from Julian to Gregorian.

If you go through the exercise trying to tie leap hours to DST, as I
challenged, you will discover that it raises many questions that are not
addressed by the leap hour proposal.

If you make some plausible assumptions as to how it would operate, with
DST starting and ending at the usual times of year and leap hours
occurring on new year's eve, I believe you will find it far from simple
to do in a rigorous fashion, and that at least one of the timescales is
genuinely discontinuous.

Mark Calabretta
ATNF
Received on Sun Jan 15 2006 - 17:29:44 PST