"Quadibloc" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Jason Rabel wrote: >> Seriously considered? The more I read it, the more I think it is just a >> bad >> joke taken too far. Instead of being happy with just adding a leap second >> every now and then, you want to screw with and break every time scale >> possible and every piece of electronic equipment on earth. > > I am happy with a leap second every now and then. > > But some people aren't happy with that, and so they want to just > abolish the leap second, without changing anything else. So, perhaps > as soon as the year 2,700, we would need to have a *leap hour*. > > I don't think that's a good idea, even if it takes time for the > consequences to become apparent. > > So I want to have a fallback proposal ready, one that gives these > people what they want - no leap seconds, so that keeping computer > networks synchronized won't be problematic - but without losing the > relationship between the time on our clocks and the time of day. > > But I don't want to upset frequency standards, and so I tried very > hard to design my proposal so that it would use a time scale that > would still have a close relationship to atomic time. There may well > be better ways to do this than the one I first proposed, as I have > started learning more about the difficulties of this. So I have gone > on to suggest other alternatives as well, such as adding a 'leap > millisecond' to one second every eight hours so that the SI second can > be kept most of the time. > > John Savard >
http://iraf.noao.edu/~seaman/leap/ contains one of the better discussions of this issue I've seen. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/utc-sls/ outlines a similar proposal to Mr. Savard's. Brian Garrett _______________________________________________ questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ntp.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
