[LEAPSECS] rewriting history of Torino Colloquium

[Rob Seaman]

On Apr 8, 2011, at 7:31 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:


> In message <FD3AEA75-2BE5-4673-B789-056EA044644F at noao.edu>, Rob Seaman writes:

>> Poul-Henning, Howdy!

>> 

>>> What the Italians did is called "Forgetting history" which is far more common and very often perfectly acceptable, than the far more insidious charge you level.

>> 

>> Um, Steve's message ended with:  "I suggest that anyone who wants not to forget history should grab a copy of the proceedings."  There aren't any charges, level or otherwise.

> 

> Please check his subject line.


Please read the rest of my previous message.

One could trot out many, many apropos quotes about history at this point (e.g., "History is the projection of ideology into the past" - anonymous), or we could simply ask the good and honorable Steve:  "Yo, Steve!  Did you mean to imply that someone had tampered with the Wayback Machine?"  Personally I don't have the slightest idea what policies the WBM uses to decide what sites to archive, but presumably it is non-trivial to hide sites outright from Sherman and Peabody.

At any rate, if history be forgot, it is equivalent to writing a different page in the book of time.  In this case we would be quite literally (and literarily) left "À la recherche du temps perdu".

To remind folks, the consensus of the Torino Colloquium was that should civil time be redefined without leap seconds (a question they chose not to answer), that the underlying timescale should be called something other than UTC.

If the ultimate goal is to suppress TAI in favor of a redefined UTC, why not skip the middle man and call it "TI", leaving UTC untouched for backwards compatibility?

It's even easier to just remove the "A" from "TAI".

Rob