[LEAPSECS] Leap smear

[Ian Batten]

On 20 Sep 2011, at 1808, Steve Allen wrote:


> On Tue 2011-09-20T17:50:05 +0100, Ian Batten hath writ:

>> You cannot imagine how little most people care about the magnitude

>> of DUT1 in five hundred years' time.

> 

> That was the attitude of factories about dumping mercury into the Rhine.

> It turned out to be something people did come to care about.

> So we also cannot imagine how much they will care about the underlying

> basis for civil time in 500 years.


That's a universal argument: it can be used to say that we shouldn't build the LHC, that we shouldn't add variable sized arrays to C, that we shouldn't get up tomorrow.

It's difficult to remove Hg from the environment for solid reasons about energy and dilution.  You can add or remove leap seconds with the stroke of a pen.  They aren't comparable.  

ian