On Thu 2011/02/10 10:43:40 -0000, Tony Finch wrote in a message to: Leap Second Discussion List <[email protected]>
>> If we're seriously expected to accept the "quadratic catastrophy" >> argument for immediately changing UTC > >Also, the "quadratic catastrophe" argument is usually used in support of >UTC. Really? Can you provide references for that. On the contrary, please refer to the original GPS World article by McCarthy & Klepczynski where the "quadratic catastrophe" is presented as a reason for change - http://gauss.gge.unb.ca/papers.pdf/gpsworld.november99.pdf Demetrios Matsakis includes the following in his report http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg13828.html dated 2000/07/02 on the results of the original leap seconds questionnaire: Three thought we should not adopt a system which will fail in the long run, even if that is a very distant time in the future. (It could be pointed out that all current time systems will eventually fail. Well before 2050 we could be routinely adding more than one leap second per year, and when we reach the point where a day is 48 hours long we would have to add a leap second every second. Even the Gregorian calendar will eventually need revision because in a few million years the Earth will rotate less than 365 times per year, and leap days will not be necessary.) Which must be a record for long-term planning! Digressing now. In looking that up I stumbled upon the following in my email archives. It seems relevant. In response to his report I mentioned the possibility of leaping timezones: Has anyone mentioned the possibility of adopting TAI as the basis of civil time and changing *timezone offsets* whenever the difference between TAI and UT1 amounted to, say, 5 minutes? The current tendency to write the timezone as, say, +1000, instead of "AEST" would make this even more plausible. Such changes would happen every few hundred years. This was his response: That's one I never heard. Somehow I suspect that even if every country in the world agreed to it, Australia's provinces would hold their ground ... and that's ok with me because I'm a bloke too. Regards, Mark Calabretta _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
