In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Rob Seaman writes: >The heart of civil timekeeping is the dynamic tension between the two >definitions of the "second": > > - as 1/86400 of a mean solar day, and > - as the SI unit of time
I have still not found where the first definition have any importance in civil timekeeping, apart from sundials. Can you give more detail ? >If this distinction had been made crystal clear in the beginning, we >wouldn't be having this discussion now. You are barking up the wrong tree again. The problem at the heart of civil timekeeping is that the rules for counting time are only known for the next six months at any one time. How we count, what we count and what it adds up to in the long run, is totally without relevance in this picture, the problem is, crudely put, that we know how many seconds there are in the next six months, but not the next 12 months. It's not the seconds, it's how we count them. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
