On 01/28/2011 18:05, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
On 28 January 2011 23:58, Rob Seaman<[email protected]> wrote:- The length-of-day on Earth has never been 86400 SI seconds long.- There are two different kinds of timekeeping. - It is the attempt to pretend otherwise that is causing the friction.This isn't primarily my discussion, but I agree with these three points 100%. Acceptable solutions - human-day (following the Sun) = 86400 human-seconds (not equal to SI-seconds) - human-day (following the Sun) = 86400 SI-seconds + an occasional fudge factor (leap seconds) - defining a scientific-day that is always 86400 SI seconds Non acceptable solutions - redefining the meaning of the human-day (such as simply removing leap seconds)
Why is this not an acceptable solution? A TAI day is a reasonable approximation of the human day. There's nothing magical about leap seconds: we got on well without them until 1972. The last statement isn't self obvious.
My point is there are other ways to align what humans experience as a day, have everybody be cool with it, and not have leap seconds involved at all.
Warner
There is certainly nothing whatsoever wrong with TAI that I can see. Stephen _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
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