On 2015-02-05 11:16, Peter Vince wrote:
Yes, I took part in the initial meeting of "professionals" (so-called
"stakeholders"), where the issues were indeed thoroughly discussed, and well
understood (apart from some unfortunate absences - no-one from the military was
there, for example). But on the video on the linked page below, nine members of
the public gave their views, one of them said "If it's not broke, don't fix it",
and two others said they didn't understand what the fuss was all about - it's
been working OK for the last 25 times. (And none of the nine people were in
favour of changing the system.) I would sympathise with both those views, but
they seem ill-informed: I believe this discussion has come about exactly because
it *is* broken, and *hasn't* been working perfectly for the last 25 times.
None of the people interviewed had even heard of leap-seconds - clearly
the stories about the long delays at Sydney(?) last time because of the Quantas
problem were too far away to register with them. That's all fine, *we* were
busy managing the problem so the rest of the world didn't have to worry - as it
should be.
But as I said before, I am disappointed that those members of the public
were left with the impression that there is nothing wrong, and we timekeepers
just want to change things for the sake of it.
But where is the detailed list of the problems with the current version
of UTC, where is the analysis of this list, and the exploration of the
solution space? Take for example the bad predictability of the current
UTC, brought up repeatedly by Warner Losh. This could perhaps be
alleviated by a long term specification of future leap seconds -- but
this is apparently not even discussed by the ITU experts for Study
Question ITU-R 236/7.
It is exactly this lack of due engineering process that leads to the
"if it ain't broke" position. And if the WRC votes for abandoning leap
seconds, we would not know whether the IERS will continue to publish DUT1,
or whether the BIPM will revoke TAI. I do not find it the least bit
surprising that most average citizens oppose such a change.
Michael Deckers.
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