On Thu, 2016-04-21 at 15:03 -0700, Tom Van Baak wrote: > Hi John, > > Given that your pUTC is pure fiction, though possibly useful fiction, > did you consider a simple polynomial fit of the Morrison and > Stephenson data, instead of those hideous, every-one-is-different, > per-century and per-decade pseudo leap second tables of yours? > > I'll try to put my finger on it, but there's something troubling > about taking a table that clearly contains numbers of very low > precision and then creating a table with algorithms and dates of high > resolution. > > I have more comments too, but let's start with this one. > > Thanks, > /tvb
Hi Tom, The values presented in the 2004 Morrison and Stephenson paper are already smoothed using a series of cubic splines and a parabola prior to -700. See their table 1 and its discussion. The authors recommended simple interpolation between the listed years, so I did that rather than add additional smoothing. To me, the only troubling thing about creating a high-precision representation of low-precision data is the implication that the result has greater accuracy than its source. I attempted to address that in my conclusion by stating that the choice of extraordinary days in ancient times is somewhat arbitrary. John Sauter ([email protected]) -- PGP fingerprint = E24A D25B E5FE 4914 A603 49EC 7030 3EA1 9A0B 511E
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