[LEAPSECS] Reliability

[Tony Finch]

On Mon, 5 Jan 2009, Rob Seaman wrote:

>

> Alternately, by relying on shifting timezones, there would be no

> underlying stabilized civil timescale permitting commonsense timekeeping

> inferences by humans.


What do you mean by "stabilized" here? Atomic time is the basis of our
most stable time scales. I don't think perturbing a timescale to follow
the erratic slow-down of the earth can reasonably be called "stabilizing"
it.

What common-sense inferences do you have in mind? Most common sense is
wrong, especially when it comes to time.


> Imagine a version of the Gregorian calendar that interpolates leap days

> only every 400 hundred years.  That would amount to about 3 months at a

> time. Since this is a whole season, it is equivalent to not stabilizing

> the calendar at all.

>

> Leap hours or tweaking timezones can be interpreted the same way.


Not really. An hour in a day is more like a couple of weeks in a year, not
three months. Two weeks is less than the variability caused by intercalary
months in lunisolar calendars.

Tony.
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