On Wed 2011-01-12T16:36:35 +0000, Tony Finch hath writ: > Yes, but how accurately do you need clocks to track it? How frequently do > you need to make adjustments to correct for the atomic/angular rate error, > and what size of adjustment is acceptable?
It would appear that making adjustments every 10 days is not often enough, at least in the US, viz: http://www.nist.gov/pml/div688/grp50/NISTUTC.cfm http://www.nist.gov/pml/div688/grp50/nistusno.cfm Even if we abandon the leap second, we have issues at the nanosecond level. > > For instance, what authority will historians or lawyers consult to learn > > the applicable timezone offsets that were in force in some location(s) > > during some epoch(s) in question? > > That problem exists whether universal time is atomic or angular so it > makes no difference to the proposal. When the leap second was invented there were countably few systems which could count every second, so a second was not a problem. Now it is. Right now there are countably few systems which can count every nanosecond. Unless there is some sort of conceptual barrier which prevents a need for nanoseconds, when such systems do become common the problem of historic time zone offset reconciliation will be trivial by comparison to the issues of systems which believe that nanosecond (picosecond) synchronization is possible without table lookups and continuous effort to track the table values. Abandoning leap seconds simply sweeps the need for good timekeeping practices under a rug rather than giving ongoing incentive to design systems which match the way chronometers actually work. -- 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
