On Mon 2010-10-25T12:23:52 -0700, Rob Seaman hath writ: > Managing the timescale wasn't originally a politically process.
Sure it was. At the founding of Rome the month was something controlled by the phase of the moon, and that made sense for the purposes of commerce given that transport of goods was safely possible on nights when the moon was near full. Within a couple of centuries the Roman month was a political entity. Caesar eventually had to assert that predictability of the calendar and alignment with long term annual agrarian cycles was more important than the political conveniences of messing with months. We are all aware of the number of cultures for whom the actual moon still regulates their notion of month and/or year. Rome created predictability, yet some folks still reject that. > The predecessor organization to the ITU-R did not assert "we own > time", they asserted, "we will provide time signals commensurate with > universal time". Unintended consequences have resulted in this naive > notion that ITU-R actions should trump the clear definition of > "Universal Time". The CCIR committee found that the advent of cesium regulation of LORAN-C demanded broadcast seconds of uniform length. The proposal they presented to the plenary session for 1970 did not constrain the broadcasts to within 1 second of Universal Time. That requirement was added during the plenary session that approved the notion of leap seconds, and modified later in response to input from astronomers. I find the current process not much different. It has been clear for some years that the time signal broadcasts must abandon the insertion of leap seconds. One interesting part of the aftermath of the SG7 session a couple of weeks ago was the number of hits I saw from all over the world to the 1884 International Meridian Conference pages. (Despite the fact that I point out those TIFFs have been transcribed to text by Project Gutenberg, people keep coming to my pages.) So it remains possible that the delegates to WRC 12 will modify the existing draft proposal to abandon leap seconds in the broadcasts by changing the name of the ITU-R time scale. That is a matter of political will. -- Steve Allen <s...@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 University of California Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs