I'm taken by the differences in presentation between Steve's figure:
http://ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/amsci.pdf
and Tom's:
http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/ut/ut-ani-v2.gif
Steve's is a depiction of scientific measurements. Tom's is a cumulative
engineering figure-of-merit. Animated versus static, etc.
One aspect of Tom's is the choice of pivot. It might prove interesting to
rather locate the pivot on the right hand side, that is, as a retrospective
tool toward a future engineering choice. We're not about to actually redefine
the SI-second at this point, but it is of perhaps more than historical interest
to understand what sort of inferences could have been drawn (in 1972 by this
data set, but similar logic could have been applied in 1958 or any other epoch)
given 40 years of past data.
Steve's presentation has also had a chance to evolve through multiple
iterations and has become more dense and presents more dimensions of
information. This same Edward Tufte style strategy could be applied to Tom's
plot to represent scheduled leap seconds, etc. (Call it "Ken Burns" mode since
it's animated :-)
Rob
_______________________________________________
LEAPSECS mailing list
[email protected]
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
