On Tue 2017-10-24T19:32:31+0000 Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ: > The parallel is not as convincing as you may think. Back then, the people > who worked with stuff where it made a difference knew what they were doing, > being generally people with "phd." after their name.
Alas, the history says that way too many of the PhDs did not. There are lots of astronomers who wrote down their concept of origin and meaning of the new second but turned out not to understand what the new value of the second actually represented. Sadler is nearly alone on record expressing the opinion that the leap second was a bad idea, everybody else thought it was the perfect solution. > If you tried to 'fix' things by adding a timescale now, 99.9% of the > people who needed to react are not clued. So it is important that documents which make a change include detailed discussions of best understandings of implications. But that has never been the case, and the documents being submitted to WP7A this week continue the tradition of not explaining the whole story. -- 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
