On Tue 2016-09-27T18:27:53 +0100, Peter Vince hath writ: > However, these new problems, and the Azure systems disagreeing between > countries, all comes back to what Warner said - scrapping leap seconds > solves all these problems, at the expense of - with due respect to Rob, > Steve. etc. - the astronomers having to increase the range of DUT1 on their > software.
In 1970 and the years afterwards the records show that astronomers said the leap second is a bad idea and will cause trouble. In 1970 and the years afterwards the records show that folks from physics labs and national radio time signal services represented the leap second as the perfect solution to all problems, and then proceeded to lobby national and international agencies to adopt it and include it into specifications. The discussion here has revisited subsequent situations where one size does not fit all, for various technical, social, political, cultural reasons. A big problem is the perception that There Can Be Only One, which when promulgated by people of authority evokes a queer parallel with the Highlander series of movies and TV shows. On the other hand, it is clear that national radio broadcasts are constrained to transmit legal time, and it is non-trivial to get governments and agencies to understand the need for more than one legal time scale and change their documents to approve such a thing. The underlying time scale used by systems should be as precise as technologically possible, and also as simple as possible. Given that, all of the other applications for technical and political preferences can be computed by a processor in a contemporary wristwatch. I want to see the leaps gone from the radio broadcast time signals. I do not see how to accomplish that without either 1) disconnecting calendar days from the rotation of earth or 2) educating bureaucracies to understand more than one time scale -- Steve Allen <[email protected]> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
