In message <[email protected]>, Rob Seaman writes:
>The real observation is the familiar one of dual timescales. Focus on >the SI second and we see the world through atomic eyeballs. Focus on >the primacy of the definition of the day in civil timekeeping, and >Earth orientation pops out. > >Both timescales are necessary. It is well documented that the SI second based timescale has precision and stability requirements on the order of microseconds for telecoms and 10 orders of magnitude smaller for scientific tasks. In contrast to this, nobody, including you, seem to be willing to even hazard a guess what level of presision is required or sufficient for the "earth orientation clock". The current UTC definition says "better than one second", but relative to an abstract definition of earth rotation angle which only astronomers can figure out. Emperical evidence show that most of the earths human population is perfectly happy with local time that is within a couple of hours of "proper" earth rotation time. The fact that almost all people who have one, trust and rely on the clock in their mobile phone, certainly much more than they do on the lengths of shadows and shadows on sun-dials, is a credible argument that no such requirement really exists, and that the mechanism proposed bu ITU combined with country-by-country timezone adjustments is a valid and solid solution. Now, stop the red-tape machine Rob, and put some facts on the table. Poul-Henning -- 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
