Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> I don't really care what your definition of "is" is,

No, but Tom apparently does.  (See next reply.)

> The civil day starts and stops whenever the most powerful civil
> authorities for a given locality decide it should do so.

"Civil day" - singular - certainly cannot mean "multitudinous local timekeeping 
rules".  Rather, the local clocks however offset via their embedded timezones 
share the synodic day as their natural 24 hour period.  The ITU might vote to 
pretend a different length of day, but that doesn't make it so.

> Your sophistry is not going to change that, so please spare us this
> pointless noise.

How about a definition for "Orwellian"?

Astronomers will feel the pain of this drastic redefinition of UTC now.  Others 
later.  Having chosen a secular cheat does not reduce the ITU's requirements 
for a coherent planning process - it increases those requirements.  If the ITU 
wants to pretend that the two clocks UTC and TAI can be replaced by a single 
clock (UTC's name, TAI's nature), they need to consider the contingent 
implications.  If they succeed in ignoring their responsibilities, the issues 
don't go away, they blow up in other people's faces.

Rob

_______________________________________________
LEAPSECS mailing list
[email protected]
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs

Reply via email to