Good morning Frank,
In the spirit of Christmas, I offer the following apocryphal story from
Australia.
A British Airways pilot approaching Darwin requested a time check from the
control tower and was informed that "at the third stroke, the time will be
"twenty thirty and thirty seconds Zulu ... beep beep beep"
A pilot from a local airline made a similar request and was told "six
o'clock in the morning, welcome to Darwin"
A private pilot from a remote cattle station also asked, and got the reply
"it's Saturday, mate, what are you doing out of bed so early?".
For most of us, near enough is good enough.
More seriously, it seems that a few pedants are driving this, and the Royal
Institute of Navigation seems to have the right idea.
Happy Christmas to all who observe it, and happy holidays to others. I'm
still not sure how happy the holiday will be here. It's been rain, rain, and
more rain for the last few days in Sydney, and more forecast. So much for my
planned camping trip. Oh well.
BTW, and linking time / date and Christmas: in his annual Christmas
broadcast, the Archbishop of Sydney has made an impassioned plea for
retention of BC / AD, and to eschew the secular adoption of BCE / CE. I
wonder who will win this particular ideological battle?
Cheers, John
John Pickard
[email protected]
----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank King" <[email protected]>
To: "Rob Seaman" <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, December 23, 2011 11:47 PM
Subject: Re: Proceedings for Future of UTC meeting
Dear Rob,
No one seems to have responded to your message
of 1 December in which you drew attention to:
http://futureofutc.org/preprints
Apart from the nice picture of the Prague clock
this is rather heavy going!
For lighter reading, I turned to the comments
that were sent in from round the world:
http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/futureofutc/preprints/18_AAS_11-668_Epilogue.pdf
Numerous contributors familiar to readers of
this mailing list sent in comments including:
Tony Finch
Rob Seaman
Patrick Powers
Frank King
John Davis
Christopher Daniel
The summary showed that there were about 450
contributors of whom 76% were in favour of
the status quo [keeping the leap second].
Two comments especially appealed to me:
John Davis said:
I (or my descendants) do not wish to have
noon drift into the middle of the night.
An anonymous contributor said:
If you want a timescale with a constant
offset from TAI, why not just use TAI?
Many others said much the same less succinctly!
The Royal Institute of Navigation seem to have
been allowed the last words and say:
In summary, making this change to UTC has a
rather esoteric rationale, limited benefits
and potentially significant costs.
Unfortunately, the matter remains unresolved.
Frank King
Cambridge, U.K.
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