On Mon, 5 Jan 2009, Rob Seaman wrote: > > Alternately, by relying on shifting timezones, there would be no > underlying stabilized civil timescale permitting commonsense timekeeping > inferences by humans.
What do you mean by "stabilized" here? Atomic time is the basis of our most stable time scales. I don't think perturbing a timescale to follow the erratic slow-down of the earth can reasonably be called "stabilizing" it. What common-sense inferences do you have in mind? Most common sense is wrong, especially when it comes to time. > Imagine a version of the Gregorian calendar that interpolates leap days > only every 400 hundred years. That would amount to about 3 months at a > time. Since this is a whole season, it is equivalent to not stabilizing > the calendar at all. > > Leap hours or tweaking timezones can be interpreted the same way. Not really. An hour in a day is more like a couple of weeks in a year, not three months. Two weeks is less than the variability caused by intercalary months in lunisolar calendars. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <[email protected]> http://dotat.at/ BISCAY SOUTHEAST FITZROY: NORTHEASTERLY 4 OR 5, INCREASING 6 AT TIMES. MODERATE, OCCASIONALLY ROUGH IN SOUTHEAST FITZROY. MAINLY FAIR. MAINLY GOOD. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
