Re: [LEAPSECS] Introduction of long term scheduling

From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk_at_phk.freebsd.dk>
Date: Wed, 03 Jan 2007 11:45:52 +0000

In message <Pine.GSO.4.58.0701031137001.17452_at_cass03>, Peter Bunclark writes:

>> Without the Moon, the Earth could nod through large angles, lying on
>> its side or perhaps even rotating retrograde every few million
>> years. Try making sense of timekeeping under such circumstances.

You mean like taking a sequence of atomic seconds, counting them
in a predicatable way and be happy that timekeeping has nothing
to do with geophysics ?

Yeah, I could live with that.

>Hang on a minute, statistically planets in the Solar System do not have a
>large moon and yet are "upright"; for example Mars comes very close to the
>conditions required to generate a leapseconds email exploder.

As far as I know the atmosphere is far to cold for that :-)

--
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 Wed Jan 03 2007 - 03:56:12 PST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Sat Sep 04 2010 - 09:44:55 PDT