[LEAPSECS] Leap smear

[Warner Losh]

On Sep 20, 2011, at 10:33 AM, Gerard Ashton wrote:

> So we have no choice but to suppose that the letter of the law/rule/regulation/standard is important, else why bother to establish the law/rule/regulation/standard in the first place.


We do have a choice.  The letter of the law/regulation is sometimes followed very carefully.  Other times it is a codification of what seemed to be a reasonable approximation.

With hunting, day hunting is different than night hunting.  Night hunting is generally frowned upon because it makes it too easy to take the animals, too hard for game wardens to enforce the rules and too easy to shoot your fellow man thinking he was a 40-point buck.  While dawn/dusk has more wiggle room in it than sunrise/sunset would on the planes, in the mountains, they are easier to police.

Both are approximations of the "well, you should only hunt when it is light enough" and nobody carries around tables of times and everybody generally agrees when it is dusk or dawn.  They could have written the rules to say "You can only hunt when the ambient light from the sun is more than so many candelas" which makes any time tinkering irrelevant.  But such a technical refinement of the rules may lead to other unintended consequences, or it may have no practical effect at all.  It is hard to say.

Warner