Warner Losh said: >> More to the point the entire notion of playing musical chairs with the >> worldwide timezone system [...]
> An hour every 10 years is 360 seconds a year, which is 20x faster than UTC > can tolerate as it is defined today. Let's turn it around. UTC as defined today can cope with up to one leap second per month, or 12 per year. Any alternative proposal therefore needs only cope up to that limit as well (otherwise we are comparing apples with oranges or, if you prefer, are tilting the playing field). 12s/yr is 1 hour every 300 years. Therefore the "musical chairs" involves a *possible* change every several lifetimes. To put this in perspective, in the UK we're talking about further away than the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar with its 11 day shift and two consecutive years of unnatural length (282 and 355 days). In half that period we've moved from local mean solar time to GMT to summer time to double summer time to back again to BST to summer time again to something like 11 different rules for the shift date to a proposed permanent one-hour change for political and economic reasons even though it takes us *away* from the sun. If paying the price of an additional one-hour shift in 12 generations time is the price to pay for getting rid of leap seconds, I'd happily pay it in a heartbeat. > It all comes down to what time on the clock should tell us: earth angle (eg, > where the sun is) or elapsed time since an epoch. This whole issue boils down > to that. Indeed. But Rob *defines* time as earth angle and then tries to tell us we're breaking the whole world. -- Clive D.W. Feather | If you lie to the compiler, Email: cl...@davros.org | it will get its revenge. Web: http://www.davros.org | - Henry Spencer Mobile: +44 7973 377646 _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs