[LEAPSECS] The relation between calendars and leap seconds.

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <FEAB8686-08F1-48B2-A436-F892C3F29075 at noao.edu>, Rob Seaman writes:

>Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ:

>

>> The limited human intelligence.

>

>I think the word you are looking for is innocence or naivete or  

>perhaps simple ignorance, not "limited intelligence".


No, actually the word I am looking for is intelligence, and I think
central to both the problem and the solution.

There are only so much nitty-gritty detail a brain can retain and
recall at relevant moments, and the scientific consensus is that
it correlates very strongly with the general "g", as long as you
control for cases of Asbergers, Autism etc.

Most people are in overflow mode when it comes to details, constantly
loosing non-memorable bits of history, which way you set the clock
on DST and your wifes birthday.  This is why people use personal
organizers, FiloFax'es, etc.

It has never been expressed better than by Ed J. Djikstra in
his classic "Programming considered as a human activity":

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD01xx/EWD117.html

	"My own feelings are perhaps best described by saying that
	I am perfectly aware that there is no Royal Road to
	Mathematics, in other words, that I have only a very small
	head and must live with it."

People who make it to our level of professional achievement, is way
above average in this particular respect.

Most of us can quote pointless details and minutae of rules, each
in our subject domain, until the birds drop roasted from the sky.
Quite a large fraction of us being helped by a tendency towards
Asbergers.

But that does not give us a mandate to make the world the rest of
the population lives in, so complex that they cannot cope with it.

Quite the contrary: the burden is on us to make life simple for
the simple, and save the complexity for those who can deal with it.

(Shakespeares observation on lawyers is in no little part
driven by this observation)

In that respect, both the pre-leap rubberseconds and the leap
seconds were very sensible ways to deal with the issue at hand
back in those days:  The number of people who had to care about
those adjustments where very very few, you could expect them
all to get the memo, and they all had "Phd" after their names.

And that is also why I think the proposal to just stop putting
leap-seconds in UTC is so eminently sensible:

It moves the problem back to people with "Phd" after their names,
primarily astronomers and the engineers who run the telescopes
and satellite antennæ.

The "leap-hour" solution, as ugly as it is, has repeatedly been
proven a perfectly adequate way to address the issue of earth
orientation relative to civil time, mostly by politicians who muck
about with timezones for no good reason, but entirely fail to make
their jurisdictions descend into (further) uncivilized chaos as a
result.


>If there is a lack of imagination here, it is on the part of the  

>scientists and engineers.  A dearth of imagination to understand the  

>full breadth of the problem of civil timekeeping, and a dearth in  

>understanding the range of possible solutions.


If there is a lack of realism anywhere, it is on the part of the
astronomers, who think that you can hold a highbrow meeting or two,
and demote a planet (which everybody loves because of the Mickey
Mouse connection) to "some random celestial rock status" and believe
that changing IT systems and the national laws of all nations is
equally effortless.

I don't care how many new timescales you want to invent for people
with Phd after their names, the only timescale that matters to
99.9999...% of this planets population is UTC, and that is the one
we have to find a workable solution for leapseconds in.

The solution can take three forms:

   1. No leap seconds.
	Solves the civil issue, but is an embuggerance for the Phds.

   2. Regular leapseconds.
	Helps nobody.

   3. Much longer warning about leap seconds.
	Might be workable for both parties.

Pick your poison.

Poul-Henning

-- 
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