[LEAPSECS] Leap smear

[Ian Batten]

On 20 Sep 2011, at 1036, Rob Seaman wrote:


> Ask yourself if your position is really that clocks could tick at any randomly chosen rate picked out of a hat?


No-one's saying that.  If you're asking the question "could civil clocks tick at any randomly chosen rate that is within 1ppm of what astronomers say it should be" then the answer is "yes".    If there were a proposal to make days 17 hours long so that noon cycled through midnight twice a week, then reductio ad absurdum discussions might be fruitful.  But as the effect on time-keeping of dropping leap-seconds is, for the 99.9999% of the population outside some subset of astronomers whose equipment is so inflexible that a DUT1 cannot be applied unless it meets specific requirements, approximately zero, no-one else will care.   Over the course of a decade the change in rate is less than any non-laboratory equipment could identify, and worrying about the potential drift of timezones over the course of millennia smacks of concern trolling.    Even for people who do need ~1s accuracy and resolution, leap seconds present a far greater problem than some theoretical unhitching from mean solar time over the course of centuries.

ian