On Mon 2003-01-27T13:53:56 -0500, John Cowan hath writ: > Currently *everyone* (not just astronomers) has to depend on distributed > leap-second information to just know what the local civil time is. That is > a most unreasonable burden.
Yes, but the reasonable solution is to develop protocols that permit the distribution of as many different forms of time as are deemed useful, and then to educate time users to choose the time scale that suits them best. > We can't do anything about the summer-time part of it, because that depends > on local political entities that can change their minds freely, but we > can do something about the leap seconds, viz. stop tying civil time to them. > The discrepancy between LCT and LMT is already in the multi-hour range > for some locations, and a half-hour or even an hour difference is considered > entirely normal. The legislatures of the various Australian provinces recently modified the legal definition of their summer time to suit the 2000 Olympics with only about a year's advance notice. This was much to the chagrin of users whose computers do not receive routine updates of their summer time databases. It would be just as easy for a legislature to assert that TAI become the civil time standard. I find it specious to presume that the legislatures of the world are incapable of making this sort of decision. If the worldwide general consensus becomes to change civil time to an unsegmented time scale, then the economic incentives for any single legislature to switch to TAI are both strong and obvious. Most of the clocks in the world would just as easily be reset by 1 hour and 32 seconds as they would by 1 hour, so there should be no technical argument against switching to TAI during some summer time transition. > I also care, as a practical matter, that the name "UTC", which is used > in (almost all of) the world's civil time legislation, be kept for that > purpose. Astronomers can very well switch to a different abbreviation for > their |UTC - UT1| < 0.9 timescale. Here be the crux. Some one or some agency is inevitably going to have to take the public risk of proclaiming this decision. Who are the parties making this decision? I suspect that they may indeed fear the ridicule of posterity, for they appear to be setting this process up as a multi-year initiative by multiple committees whose membership is obscure, meetings to attend, and minutes published in proceedings with low circulation and exorbitant price. It will be hard to blame anybody for whatever result happens. >From a social standpoint the goal should be to set up sufficient advance preparation so that any change that occurs can be absorbed in the natural costs of doing business for *EVERYONE*, not just for some. -- Steve Allen UCO/Lick Observatory Santa Cruz, CA 95064 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice: +1 831 459 3046 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla PGP: 1024/E46978C5 F6 78 D1 10 62 94 8F 2E 49 89 0E FE 26 B4 14 93