On Sat 2022-10-29T13:48:19-0400 Joseph Gwinn hath writ: > So, those faulty designers of yore had insufficient clairvoyance > skills.
Not the fault of the designers. The Time Lords who incepted leap seconds were caught between conflicting legal requirements. They had no choice, or rather, no choice other than to risk becoming part of another another Ides of March scenario in international timekeeping. Their lack of choice included preventing their dilemma from appearing in official documents. They knew that leap seconds were technically barren and that no other legal option was possible to implement at that time. This is why Winkler limited himself to paraphrasing Mr. Spock while directing that the USNO navigational broadcast systems would shift from old UTC to TAI-10. The need for purely atomic time was evident more than 50 years ago, but the ability to implement it correctly was not yet technically possible. So the principals guarded their speech into their retirement and death rather than advocate that the leap second scheme was necessarily temporary and would need to be replaced by something better. -- Steve Allen <s...@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
