Re: [LEAPSECS] The opportunity of leap seconds

From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk_at_phk.freebsd.dk>
Date: Sat, 07 Jan 2006 19:22:40 +0100

In message <E9FB8EB5-44DF-4CFB-A61B-9B3A85A23629_at_noao.edu>, Rob Seaman writes:

>Astronomers use UT1. Astronomers use UTC. Astronomers are among the
>biggest users of TAI and GPS and likely any other timescale you care
>to name.

And they certainly have a lot of trouble seeing the rest of the world
in for the brightness of their own majesty.

The only timescale I am interested in here is UTC, and astronomers
are not even close to registering as a marginal group in the user
communities of UTC.

What Astronomers use UTC for, in your own many times repeated words,
is "a convenient approximation of UT1", and consequently it follows
that if instead of an approximation astronomers used the Real Thing,
leap seconds could harmlessly be removed from UTC.

>By your logic, the U.S. Surgeon General should be a chiropractor.

Once the US government tries to shoulder their national deficit
that would undoubtedly be a good idea.

>[various ramblings]

> Canoli = common basis for diverse time usage worldwide
> Eclair = baseline representation of Earth orientation
>
>Unless we *completely* change our notion of Canoli, Canoli is tightly
>constrained to follow Eclair simply by the fact that today and
>tomorrow and the million days that follow are all required to be dark
>at night and light in the day.

Wrong on all points.

Light of day and darkness of night already is, and for all relevant
future can be, assured by governmental adjustments of the two functions
government control in the formula:

        Civil Time(time) = UTC(time) +
                     TimeZoneOffset(country, subdivision, time) +
                     SeasonalOffset(country, subdivision, time)

>[various ramblings]

--
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk_at_FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Received on Sat Jan 07 2006 - 10:33:29 PST

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