On Jan 11, 2012, at 9:53 AM, Rob Seaman wrote: > Warner Losh wrote: > >> Tom Van Baak wrote: >> >>> Although on average LOD is more than 86400 s by a few milliseconds, in the >>> past fifty years about 3% of the days have been shorter than 86400 s. In >>> the past decade alone the figure is 14% (the earth has sped up quite a bit >>> the past decade). You can imagine then that some days must be rather close >>> to no error. >>> >>> Five days were within 1 microsecond and the record goes to November 29, >>> 2004 which was just 200 nanoseconds shy of a perfect 86400 second day. >> >> How much better would be if we'd adapted a mean solar second of 1900 instead >> of 1820 which we wound up with? > > See Steve's plot: > > http://ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/lod.pdf > > or the top plot of http://ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/amsci.html, zoomed to > recent decades. > > The Earth would be deemed fast by about 4 ms / days (five millionths of a > percent if I've got the decimal right). > > What is "better" or "perfect" here is a matter of debate.
For the purposes of my question "better" means "lower rate of leap second introduction for the next few decades" Warner
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