Steve Allen wrote on 2003-08-09 05:46 UTC: > Also note the interesting content of this message from 1988 > http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/misc/tcp_ip/8801.mm.www/0022.html > This purports to explain why June leap seconds became preferred to > December leap seconds.
The explanation given has all the hallmarks of someone having told a joke, and someone else didn't get it and believed it was a true story. Assuming "the French" refers to IERS, then all "they" have to do to insert a leap second is to send out a Bulletin C, but that happens already many months (typically siz) in advance. Therefore, nobody at IERS has any reason to be "missing their New Year's Eve party year after year" in order to insert a leap second, because all their work has already been done half a year earlier. Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
