On Aug 13, 2005, at 2:09 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
There are some fundamental differences here. Looking at leap years, the formula that we have could produce a table. The table could be tweaked at various points to optimize things over the short term to be better.
The table/formula paradigm (must be some better terminology, "discrete" versus "closed form" or some such) can likely appear in several different ways. I was thinking of "corrections" more in the sense of preserving the historical record. For UTC, for instance, these would be the various Bulletins with their lists of previous leap seconds and the evolution of DUT1. Suspect we'll continue to tweak these concepts through several iterations. Rob Seaman National Optical Astronomy Observatory
