Re: [LEAPSECS] Comments on Civil Time decision tree

From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk_at_phk.freebsd.dk>
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:56:07 +0200

In message <4338069C.28443.7CAE3101_at_dan.tobias.name>, "Daniel R. Tobias" writes
:
>On 26 Sep 2005 at 16:09, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>
>> Other more laid back parliaments like the Danish have not been able
>> to find time to revisit the issue since 18xx and still use solar
>> time at some more or less random coordinate.
>
>You mean like the U.S. Congress?
>http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/260.html
>
>"...the standard time of the first zone shall be based on the mean
>solar time of the sixtieth degree of longitude west from
>Greenwich..." (and so on for all the other zones)

Well, at least they had the sense to use a longitude divisible by
15. Not so lucky in Denmark: 50°19'

>> Imagine for instance that we send a probe out of the solar system
>> at seriously high speeds and it manages to get as far as 6 light
>> months away: Under the current UTC rules we would be unable to
>> upload a leap-second warning and get it there before it is too late.
>
>I would suppose that such a space probe would have little need to be
>synchronized with earthly solar time, and thus might be best off
>operating on TAI, with any adjustments to UTC for the sake of humans
>observing it on Earth being done at the Earthly end of things.

Again: merely trying to point out that the "only one timescale"
argument Rob pushes doesn't work.

--
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 Mon Sep 26 2005 - 12:06:44 PDT

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