Re: timestamps on death certificates
> Seriously, these are,uh, interesting scenarios, ...that are very similar to actual lawsuits that were filed in the nineteenth century over the corresponding ambiguity between apparent solar time and mean solar time or between local time and standard (zone) time. Wherever there is a contract there is the opportunity for time based litigation. > birth and death are processes that do not span a discrete instant > such that a particular second (leap or not) should make a difference. This is the same old confusion between periodic and secular effects again. Banishing leap seconds is a secular effect - it may be small at any given epoch, but it just piles up and piles up. Errors in setting or reading clocks, on the other hand, sometimes add and sometimes subtract - in short, they are random. > I'm still intersted in finding out about UT1 (or UT2) being the basis > of civil time; I thought we in the U.S., atavistic though we may be > about switching to SI units, were at least on track with the rest of > the world by making UTC the legal basis of civil time. Why do you assume that the rest of the world has legally adopted UTC? >From the discussions on this list it appears that many - or most - or perhaps all - countries have basically no single legal timebase, and that the assumption that civil time is some constant offset from GMT appears throughout the world's legal codes. You don't believe this to be the case? The burden is on the proponents of any change to civil time to demonstrate that out of hundreds of countries and thousands of juridictions, that no significant trouble will come out of making the first significant change to the underlying nature of civil time in 120 years. Tell me, proponents - have you paid even one lawyer one cent to consider this issue? The most embarassing aspect of this situation for the precision timing community is that not only have they not invested two bits (another of those crappy American units, huh?) in characterizing the national and international dependencies on UTC approximating GMT - but they appear not to even understand why one would want to do such a thing before making such a fundamental change. I suspect other folks had the same reaction to the reality of Y2K that I did - a deep sigh of relief followed by a halo of wistfulness over missing out on the schadenfreude of watching Ghostbuster scale catastrophes in somebody else's backyard. Care to try it the other way around? Rob Seaman
Re: timestamps on death certificates
- Original Message - From: "Kevin J. Rowett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 8:57 AM Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] timestamps on death certificates > Many wills and living trusts these days are written to provide > for concurrent death events of both spouses, even to the point of > defining concurrent to be within 30 hours of each other. > > KR > > > -Original Message- > From: Leap Seconds Issues [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of > Steve Allen > Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 8:45 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] timestamps on death certificates > > > On Fri 2003-06-06T07:37:57 +0100, Peter Bunclark hath writ: > > A husband has a will leaving everything to his wife, or if she dies first, > > to their children. The wife has a will leaving everything to her secret > > lover. They are together in a car crash, and are put on life-support > > systems including heart monitors. They both, sadly, die at around the > > same time; both have a last-recorded heartbeat. > > But suspecting her nature, the husband had insisted on a prenuptial > agreement that nullified her inheritance rights until the marriage > passed its first anniversary. After having tea at home with his kids, > they were travelling on their way to a second honeymoon. Their > recorded times of death were both only seconds past midnight. > > While preparing for probate some of the lawyers note that the recorded > times of death were after midnight according to the new leap-free UTC, > but before civil midnight as defined by existing statute. During the > ensuing legal discovery free-for-all other lawyers find that one of > the hospital maintenance technicians sets the clocks on the heart > monitors using new leap-free UTC, and another sets them according to > the GMT-based statute. > > After the judge awards the inheritance, the losing parties sue the > hospital for failing to maintain standard practices. > > Leap Free Civil Time: boldly going where no mysogynistic case law > fantasy has gone before. > I see the makings of a new TV series here: "Law and Order: Timekeeping Division". In episode one, things turn ugly when a terrorist threatens to blow up the firm's office by placing cesium he managed to steal from their HP5071 in the basement into the water cooler. :-) Seriously, these are,uh, interesting scenarios, but as you just pointed out and as Tom Van Baak mentioned, birth and death are processes that do not span a discrete instant such that a particular second (leap or not) should make a difference. I'm still intersted in finding out about UT1 (or UT2) being the basis of civil time; I thought we in the U.S., atavistic though we may be about switching to SI units, were at least on track with the rest of the world by making UTC the legal basis of civil time. Brian Garrett
Re: pedagogically barren?
On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Markus Kuhn wrote: > I asked Ron Beard, and he said that there were no plans for written > post-proceedings of this meeting. I personally would have liked very > much to end up with a written book of everything that was presented and > discussed. Yet again I am struck by how unfavourably the way the present proposals are going compares to the 1884 Meridian Conference. That produced 200 pages of well-argued proceedings, and the participants knew that it was for governments to decide any changes to legal practice after considering the recommendations of the conference, not for one body with its own agenda unilaterally to decide to change time signals and let governments pick up the pieces. -- Joseph S. Myers [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: timestamps on death certificates
Many wills and living trusts these days are written to provide for concurrent death events of both spouses, even to the point of defining concurrent to be within 30 hours of each other. KR -Original Message- From: Leap Seconds Issues [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Allen Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 8:45 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] timestamps on death certificates On Fri 2003-06-06T07:37:57 +0100, Peter Bunclark hath writ: > A husband has a will leaving everything to his wife, or if she dies first, > to their children. The wife has a will leaving everything to her secret > lover. They are together in a car crash, and are put on life-support > systems including heart monitors. They both, sadly, die at around the > same time; both have a last-recorded heartbeat. But suspecting her nature, the husband had insisted on a prenuptial agreement that nullified her inheritance rights until the marriage passed its first anniversary. After having tea at home with his kids, they were travelling on their way to a second honeymoon. Their recorded times of death were both only seconds past midnight. While preparing for probate some of the lawyers note that the recorded times of death were after midnight according to the new leap-free UTC, but before civil midnight as defined by existing statute. During the ensuing legal discovery free-for-all other lawyers find that one of the hospital maintenance technicians sets the clocks on the heart monitors using new leap-free UTC, and another sets them according to the GMT-based statute. After the judge awards the inheritance, the losing parties sue the hospital for failing to maintain standard practices. Leap Free Civil Time: boldly going where no mysogynistic case law fantasy has gone before. -- 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 2E49 89 0E FE 26 B4 14 93
Re: timestamps on death certificates
On Fri 2003-06-06T07:37:57 +0100, Peter Bunclark hath writ: > A husband has a will leaving everything to his wife, or if she dies first, > to their children. The wife has a will leaving everything to her secret > lover. They are together in a car crash, and are put on life-support > systems including heart monitors. They both, sadly, die at around the > same time; both have a last-recorded heartbeat. But suspecting her nature, the husband had insisted on a prenuptial agreement that nullified her inheritance rights until the marriage passed its first anniversary. After having tea at home with his kids, they were travelling on their way to a second honeymoon. Their recorded times of death were both only seconds past midnight. While preparing for probate some of the lawyers note that the recorded times of death were after midnight according to the new leap-free UTC, but before civil midnight as defined by existing statute. During the ensuing legal discovery free-for-all other lawyers find that one of the hospital maintenance technicians sets the clocks on the heart monitors using new leap-free UTC, and another sets them according to the GMT-based statute. After the judge awards the inheritance, the losing parties sue the hospital for failing to maintain standard practices. Leap Free Civil Time: boldly going where no mysogynistic case law fantasy has gone before. -- 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 2E49 89 0E FE 26 B4 14 93
Re: pedagogically barren?
> A propos of both the topic and the discussion of notation, I've observed > that in the U.S., hospitals (where 24-hour notation, or "military time" as > civilians inevitably call it) are one of the few businesses where wall > clocks are nearly always set to the correct time (within+/- one minute, and > often within +/- 10 seconds, as checked against my WWVB watch). The correct > time on birth and death certificates is important, but I was not aware of > how important until I saw a posting from Prof. David Mills on > comp.protocols.time.ntp in which he said that UT1 (not UTC) is the legal > standard for death certificates. My reaction was that this is fascinating > if true, but even if it is (I couldn't find any documentation of this), I > would have to wonder how DUT1 becomes an issue if the tolerance is (as > currently) less than one second? > > Does anyone have any firshand knowledge of forensic medical issues related > to DUT1? The implications of removing the 0.9s limit are clear if Prof. > Mills is correct, but my impression was that time-of-day need only be > precise to within one minute for birth and death certificates. > > > Brian Garrett I'd be interested to hear how one measures the leading edge of the human life to death transition pulse with a precision that makes the UT1 vs. UTC question even relevant. /tvb
UT1 vs. UT2
On Thu 2003-06-05T13:10:10 -0700, Brian Garrett hath writ: > time on birth and death certificates is important, but I was not aware of > how important until I saw a posting from Prof. David Mills on > comp.protocols.time.ntp in which he said that UT1 (not UTC) is the legal > standard for death certificates. The US Code currently specifies mean solar time on 15 degree meridians west of Greenwich. At the time that the US Code was last revised, broadcast time signals in most of the world provided UT2, not UT1. So I would offer that at a sub-second resolution UT2 might be the legal time in the US because it is more "mean" than UT1. Note that the old expression for UT2 is still prominently displayed on the main page of the Earth Orientation Department of the US Naval Observatory http://maia.usno.navy.mil/ I don't really understand why it is there, except as a historical footnote. If it were to be used today, the old expression would best be replaced by a newer one based on the mean orbital motion used in the most recent IAU nutation model and on seasonal earth rotation variations as measured by VLBI over the past 20 years. On the other hand, at the level you can time a death, birth, traffic accident, crime, financial transaction, or whatever, one second is about as good as could be civilly relevant. At that level, UT0, UT1, UT2, GMT, and UTC are currently indistinguishable. There are probably very few tests of legal issues at a finer resolution. And that is why UTC, despite the unilateral power grab at its origin, has been such a useful timescale for the past 30 years. It has SI seconds, and does not deviate in value by more than a second from the historical civil and legal understanding of "time-of-day". I've grown accustomed to tuning into WWV and hearing them announce that they provide time of day, standard time interval, and other related information It would be disappointing to hear it change to atomic time, standard time interval, and other related information -- 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 2E49 89 0E FE 26 B4 14 93
Re: pedagogically barren?
- Original Message - From: "Markus Kuhn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2003 2:33 AM Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] pedagogically barren? > "Seeds, Glen" wrote on 2003-06-04 15:00 UTC: > > It's also true that changing to SI units for weight and volume is a lot more > > technically tractable than for length. Public opposition would still be a > > big barrier, though. > > That's what the UK have done. The imperial units of weight and volume > are not legally recognized any more in Britain (only pints are still > permitted for drinks volume), whereas inch/yard/mile continue to be > legally recognized for length and speed. > > To bring the topic closer back to the scope of this mailing list: > > One international standard related to time keeping that I would like to > advertise for is the international standard numeric date and time > notation (ISO 8601), i.e. 2002-08-15 and 14:14:57. > > Whereas both the modern 23:59:59 and the old fashioned 11:59:59 p.m. are > equally widely used in Britain, the modern notation seems to be mostly unknown > in the US outside the military and scientific communities (and the US > military seem to drop the colon as in "1800" and say strange things like > "eighteen hundred hours" instead of "eighteen o'clock"). The uniform > modern 00:00 ... 23:59 notation is now commonly used in Britain for > almost any publically displayed timetable (bus, trains, cinemas, > airports, etc.), and on the Continent they haven't used anything else to > write times for many decades. > A propos of both the topic and the discussion of notation, I've observed that in the U.S., hospitals (where 24-hour notation, or "military time" as civilians inevitably call it) are one of the few businesses where wall clocks are nearly always set to the correct time (within+/- one minute, and often within +/- 10 seconds, as checked against my WWVB watch). The correct time on birth and death certificates is important, but I was not aware of how important until I saw a posting from Prof. David Mills on comp.protocols.time.ntp in which he said that UT1 (not UTC) is the legal standard for death certificates. My reaction was that this is fascinating if true, but even if it is (I couldn't find any documentation of this), I would have to wonder how DUT1 becomes an issue if the tolerance is (as currently) less than one second? Does anyone have any firshand knowledge of forensic medical issues related to DUT1? The implications of removing the 0.9s limit are clear if Prof. Mills is correct, but my impression was that time-of-day need only be precise to within one minute for birth and death certificates. Brian Garrett
Re: timestamps on death certificates
Markus Kuhn wrote: > ... Anyone who ever attended a birth Haven't we all attended at least one? I don't remember much of mine though Salvador Dali claimed to remember being in the womb.
Re: Torino meeting and implications of international time >> UT1
> William Klepczynski: In safety-critical navigation systems, leap seconds > will over time cause catastrophic system failures that will cost many > lives. This long-term risk should justify even considerable one-off > expenses to fix permanently the problem of a commonly used non-uniform > precision timescale. Perhaps this is true. It may also be true that such safety critical navigation systems implicitly rely on civil time being based on GMT. This is the reality of civil time that has applied since the 19th century. I can imagine innumerable ways in which software systems, hardware systems or the operational procedures for navigation (either terrestrial or celestial) might depend on UTC ~= GMT. Why should we accept any anecdotal handwaving on this subject? Not only would acting on such flimsy reasoning be intellectually bankrupt, it might actually be criminal. If any individual has hard evidence to suggest that specific systems or procedures are intrinsically subject to failure due to leap seconds - and equally importantly - are *not* subject to failure from breaking the approximation of GMT by UTC, well then, let that evidence be presented. It certainly has not been presented previously on this mailing list, and it sounds like such wasn't presented in Torino either. Were any representatives of the air traffic control or other safety critical navigational communities present at the meeting? Such input should be sought up front, not brought in at the end to justify a conclusion that "Leap seconds must die!" that was already formed prior to Y2K. Rob Seaman National Optical Astronomy Observatory
Re: Torino meeting and implications of international time >> UT1
On Thu 2003-06-05T17:46:38 +0100, Markus Kuhn hath writ: > Ron Beard: Several calls of the SRG have not resulted in any substantial > data on what a change would cost or damage. I would not slight the efforts that have been made thus far, but to claim that the SRG has adequately made calls is hogwash. I have been trying to gather cost estimates of eliminating leap seconds, and I know that it is not easy. Much of the problem is that people do not understand how deeply their systems depend on leap seconds. It takes an enormous amount of pedagogy to motivate a response. As noted in the title of my last posting, the SRG has made too little effort in that direction. There should be detailed published explanations of systems which are known to have difficulties with leap seconds, and also of systems which are known not to have difficulties with leap seconds. The question before the SRG cannot be answered in satisfaction to everyone. Basically it amounts to asking "who do we screw, and how gently do we screw them?" So far I perceive the SRG's strategy to be inconsiderate to astronomers and posterity, among others. > William Klepczynski: In safety-critical navigation systems, leap seconds > will over time cause catastrophic system failures that will cost many > lives. This long-term risk should justify even considerable one-off > expenses to fix permanently the problem of a commonly used non-uniform > precision timescale. I rebut that any system whose designers cannot implement a specification as clearly spelled out as the current scheme for UTC has much worse things to worry about than leap seconds. -- 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 2E49 89 0E FE 26 B4 14 93
Re: timestamps on death certificates
Markus Kuhn said: > Humans stay perfectly concious and altert up to about > 12-15 seconds after the last heartbeat (even after decapitation, as > Voltaire demonstrated during the French revolution so elegantly in his > famous very last scientific experiment), Voltaire died of old age in 1778. I think you're thinking of Lavoisier, though sources vary as to whether anything was actually demonstrated. -- Clive D.W. Feather | Work: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | Tel:+44 20 8495 6138 Internet Expert | Home: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | *** NOTE CHANGE *** Demon Internet | WWW: http://www.davros.org | Fax:+44 870 051 9937 Thus plc|| Mobile: +44 7973 377646
Re: Torino meeting and implications of international time >> UT1
Rob Seaman wrote on 2003-06-05 16:04 UTC: > Surely we should characterize and fully understand the implications of > our actions *before* we act. Is that really an unreasonable request? To quote (not verbatim, but in essence) what several people said on that at the meeting: Ron Beard: Several calls of the SRG have not resulted in any substantial data on what a change would cost or damage. John Seago: In many environments, even getting an answer to the question of what it would cost to abandon UTC ~ UT1 would cost substantial amounts of money. William Klepczynski: In safety-critical navigation systems, leap seconds will over time cause catastrophic system failures that will cost many lives. This long-term risk should justify even considerable one-off expenses to fix permanently the problem of a commonly used non-uniform precision timescale. [... all quotes modulo my rapidly decaying memory of course ...] Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
Re: timestamps on death certificates
Peter Bunclark wrote on 2003-06-06 06:37 UTC: > > > The correct > > > time on birth and death certificates is important, but I was not aware of > > > how important until I saw a posting from Prof. David Mills on > > > comp.protocols.time.ntp in which he said that UT1 (not UTC) is the legal > > > standard for death certificates. http://www.google.com/groups?selm=3D62BE42.359C0C9E%40udel.edu Well, he really doesn't go into a great amount of detail, about why his Coroner Standard Time (CST) should be an integral hour offset to UT1 exactly. > > I'd be interested to hear how one measures the > > leading edge of the human life to death transition > > pulse with a precision that makes the UT1 vs. > > UTC question even relevant. > > A husband has a will leaving everything to his wife, or if she dies first, > to their children. The wife has a will leaving everything to her secret > lover. They are together in a car crash, and are put on life-support > systems including heart monitors. They both, sadly, die at around the > same time; both have a last-recorded heartbeat. To anyone with even a basic understanding of human biology and modern intensive care practice, the notion that death could be determined within better than a minute, not to mention within 1000 ms, is nothing but ridiculous. Humans stay perfectly concious and altert up to about 12-15 seconds after the last heartbeat (even after decapitation, as Voltaire demonstrated during the French revolution so elegantly in his famous very last scientific experiment), and at normal body temperature, the central nervous system starts to suffer irreparable damage at about 200-300 seconds after the blood flow stops (~10x longer at 10 K lower temperature). Except for extreme accidents involving detonations or crashes (e.g., two planes colliding with GPS-guided 1-m precision alignment during a leap second in 2015, whose flight recorders use UTC and TI respectively), death is nothing but the gradual accumulation of tissue damage, and life is a function of the patience and funding of your intensive care team. The medical definition of death is simply the minute at which a doctor decides that this patient is dead and looks at a clock to turn this into the legal transaction that makes further recusitation attempts unnecessary. Or did you never wonder, why in so many reports critically wounded people transported in ambulances die the minute they arrive at a hospital, but almost never during transport? Anyone who ever attended a birth will also be able to attest that it is equally a gradual process that takes significatly longer than 1000 ms. I seriously doubt that the authors of the US regulations for timestamps on death certificates even understand the difference between GMT, UT1 and UTC, neither have they any practical need to do so. Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
ISO 8601
> More information on ISO 8601: > > http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html Those of us who were responsible for Y2K remediation of our respective projects know ISO 8601 inside and out. To bring the conversation back to leap seconds from firkins, fathoms and furlongs, surely one of the strongest reasons to question the wisdom of an entirely unnecessary change to timekeeping is precisely to avoid the possibility of introducing Y2K-like bugs into potentially critical systems the world over. Surely we should characterize and fully understand the implications of our actions *before* we act. Is that really an unreasonable request? Rob Seaman National Optical Astronomy Observatory
Re: pedagogically barren?
Markus Kuhn scripsit: > (and the US > military seem to drop the colon as in "1800" and say strange things like > "eighteen hundred hours" instead of "eighteen o'clock"). They say "klicks" for "kilometers", too. > I really wonder, why the modern notation doesn't > catch on in the US, where even air travel tickets still use the awkward > notation (and solve the ambiguity problem by never scheduling any event > exactly on noon or midnight). You underestimate the tendency of Americans to think that the way they do it is the way God intended (*and* to consider that of paramount importance). -- Some people open all the Windows; John Cowan wise wives welcome the spring [EMAIL PROTECTED] by moving the Unix. http://www.reutershealth.com --ad for Unix Book Units (U.K.) http://www.ccil.org/~cowan (see http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/unix3image.gif)
Re: pedagogically barren?
-- But that, he realized, was a foolishJohn Cowan thought; as no one knew better than he [EMAIL PROTECTED] that the Wall had no other side.http://www.ccil.org/~cowan --Arthur C. Clarke, "The Wall of Darkness"
Re: pedagogically barren?
Peter Bunclark wrote: On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, William Thompson wrote: Markus Kuhn wrote: (stuff deleted) While the international inch is indeed linked to the meter by a reasonably round factor, and even shows up indirectly in a number of ISO standards (e.g., inch-based threads and pipes), this can clearly not be said for the US pound and the US gallon and units derived from these, which are still required by US federal law to be present on consumer packages. As long as it remains legal and even required in the US to price goods per gallon or pound (units completely unrelated to the inch!), (rest deleted) According to the NIST website, a gallon is defined as exactly 231 cubic inches. I would say that was a long way from being completely unrelated to the inch. While the pound is unrelated to the inch, it is defined as exactly 0.45359237 kilograms. Neither is a nice round number, but there is a definite relationship. William Thompson Well would you Americans consider stopping calling them English Units? It makes me cringe every time the Mars Climate Observer crash is blamed on `English Units'. We call the British equivalent Imperial Units, implying a definite historical context. And teach our kids SI units. Pete. You didn't hear me calling them English Units. I'm surrounding by too many Brits to do that anymore. Actually, the phrase I like is Flintstone Units, which I think I first heard on this mailing list. :-) William Thompson
