Questions about leap seconds are recurrent here, but few posters have apparently been willing to learn enough about them to discuss them in an informed way.
The standard reference, for those who may need or wish to do so, is: Nelson, R. A., et al. 'The leap second: its history and possible future'. Metrologia, volume 38 (2001), pp. 509-529. Metrologia is the standard time-measurement journal, and reading it regularly would help to keep anyone who needed or wished to be informed about metrology decently so. (Readers are assumed to be technically educated and competent readers of technical English, French, German, or Italian.) About negative leap seconds: they have always been envisaged as possible, and provision was made ab initio for them. We came close to having one recently, and they are not at all problematic: provided only that the time scale, e.g., that embodied in STCKE values, associated with them is itself monotone increasing, they need not be (as I made clear in an earlier post). John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ Groups: Create an online spot for your favorite groups to meet. http://windowslive.com/online/groups?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_groups_032009 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
