[LEAPSECS] Leap smear

[Warner Losh]

On Sep 20, 2011, at 10:43 AM, Stephen Colebourne wrote:

> However, the tzdata approach ends up with no meaningful common sense

> definition. The offset becomes an ever increasing offset to some

> arbitrary clock to the length of day 500+ years ago that a bunch of

> time nerds back then was more important that the length of the solar

> day. I posit that people would be uncomfortable about that lack of

> ability to link the concept of time and offset to something

> meaningful, like a solar day. And if people are uncomfortable, then

> politicians become uncomfortable. Perhaps, one or more countries would

> redefine time completely as a result, who knows...


Roads today are the size they are due to horses asses.  That doesn't seem to bother people.  They don't care that the size of the roads were basically set in roman times to accommodate carts drawn by horses two abreast.  This standard persisted after the fall of the roman empire because the roads were there and all the people that knew how to make carriages kept making them the same size, so any new roads had to be made the same size as the old roads.  When it came time to make the first trains, they were made by the carriage makers, to the standard gage for trains was approximately what the size of a road had been.  In a similar vein, the roads we drove on today are the size they are because the first cars were little more than motorized carriages, also made by the same folks.

Never under-estimate the reason "We base the time off of time in england back in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the earth has slowed down a bit, so the details are messy even though we still use that same basic scheme." coupled with "tradition."

Heck, that's why we use the definition of a second that makes this problem happen every couple of years instead of every few decades.  We use a second which is the length of time of a particular fraction of a mean solar year in 1820.

Warner