That's an interesting approach getting ISO involved. I have no
direct experience with that group; can you fill some of us in on
the workings, or the scope of that institution? And specifically,
how does ISO relate to, or compare to, ITU, or BIPM (which I
assumed was in change of the system of
On Dec 15, 2010, at 7:49 AM, Tom Van Baak wrote:
As for your universal comment; that's problematic. I suspect
you will find many uses of that word which are quite unrelated
to astronomy; from universal studios to universal health case.
Lots of terminology is overloaded. The ITU on the other
If ISO does publish a standard, I hope they distribute it better than
they did ISO 8601. In that case, they made it absurdly expensive, and
then published a free summary of it on their website claiming it was the
best way to write dates, but left out so many important details that
anyone who
Many of your comments are addressed in AIAA-2010-8391, which Ken, John,
and I wrote for the Toronto AAS conference last August. It is available
online, or interested parties can write me personally, and I will
provide copies. AGI did not relinquish complete copy rights to AIAA or
AAS.
ISO 8601
On 2010-12-15 17:47, Finkleman, Dave wrote:
ISO 8601 is a problem. So far I have not heard anything from ISO TC12,
which is responsible. But I am diligent. I will extract something from
them. Their treatment of time is deficient and inconsistent. I don't
know how this was
ISO is not a governmental organization. It does not enforce and it
cannot mandate any of its standards.
No, but it exerts an almost magnetic effect on public sector organisations in
the UK and what one might loosely refer to as German-influenced countries
(Holland, Germany, Scandinavia,
