[time-nuts] Re: UTC - A Cautionary Tale

M. Warner Losh imp at bsdimp.com
Fri Jul 15 19:07:24 EDT 2005


In message: <8366C59E-C587-4DF6-ABB0-9A9D92008DDC at noao.edu>
            Rob Seaman <seaman at noao.edu> writes:
: Historians may care deeply about whether some event  
: occurred on one day (as defined by the Earth) as opposed to another  
: day (as defined by mid-level international bureaucrats).  Religious  
: issues anybody?

We already have ambiguity in when something occurs, as defined by
Earth.  Each timezone is 15 degrees wide, and thus something may
happen at 11:59:59pm local standard time, but really happen at
12:01:01am the next day 'solar' time.  We lost earth local time when
we went to a standard time years ago.  That introduced 30 or more
minutes of ambiguity between the mean local solar time and the
standard time.  Given such a large ambiguity that people accept today,
it is hard to believe that they can't accept a few more seconds (or
even minutes).

This doesn't address the other issues with keeping or removing leap
seconds in the future, I know, but others have done a good job there.

Warner




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