[LEAPSECS] What's the point?

[Tony Finch]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2011, Mark Calabretta wrote:

>

> If we're seriously expected to accept the "quadratic catastrophy"

> argument for immediately changing UTC


Also, the "quadratic catastrophe" argument is usually used in support of
UTC. It is argued that a very small and slowly increasing rate difference
between civil time and earth rotation is a disaster and unacceptable
because the rate difference becomes quadratically larger. Never mind that
it won't make any practical difference for thousands of years and that we
already have an older mechanism that works better than leap seconds for
dealing with differences between an international time scale and local
civil time.

Tony.
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