Because the past remains with us, and the future requires planning.
By discarding any stationary mapping from local clocks (and calendar)
to an underlying "universal" timescale, historical provenance and long
range planning acquire a spatially dependent error term that grows
with time. The historical trend (http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/ancient.png
) won't just vanish with the actions of the ITU, it will pop up again
somewhere else.
In short, time has duration not just discrete epochs to worry about.
Rob
---
On Dec 17, 2008, at 6:01 PM, John Cowan wrote:
Rob Seaman scripsit:
For instance, I happen to think your notion about perpetually
revolving the time zone offsets around the planet under completely
local authority is spectacularly unworkable.
Why are such changes in timezone unworkable, provided they
don't happen too often? The median frequency of changes in timezone
(neglecting DST changes) is several per century as it is: see the
Olson data.
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