On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 5:46 AM, M.-A. Lemburg <[email protected]> wrote: [Alexander Belopolsky] >> ... "due to the initial choice of the value of the second >> (1/86400 mean solar day of the year 1820)" sounds like nonsense. [MAL] > More details on all this are available at: > http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/leapsec.html (provided their server is up)
Thanks for the link! "Modern studies have indicated that the epoch at which the mean solar day was exactly 86,400 SI seconds was approximately 1820." makes much more sense: they did not pick the value for SI second to match 1/86400 mean solar day of the year 1820, it just so happened that the value they picked for other reasons matched later estimates of what we now think 1/86400 mean solar day of the year 1820 was. I now believe it was all a bad PR. What they should have done was to announce that according to the new measurements a "year" is 1 second longer than people thought, so they would add 1 second at the end of June *every year*, but since the Earth is wobbling unpredictably, on some years they will occasionally skip a second in December. If they did that, 30 years later leap second support would be as widespread as support for February 29. _______________________________________________ Datetime-SIG mailing list [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/datetime-sig The PSF Code of Conduct applies to this mailing list: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
