[LEAPSECS] Straw men

[Warner Losh]

On Jan 11, 2012, at 9:53 AM, Rob Seaman wrote:


> Warner Losh wrote:

> 

>> Tom Van Baak wrote:

>> 

>>> Although on average LOD is more than 86400 s by a few milliseconds, in the past fifty years about 3% of the days have been shorter than 86400 s. In the past decade alone the figure is 14% (the earth has sped up quite a bit the past decade). You can imagine then that some days must be rather close to no error.

>>> 

>>> Five days were within 1 microsecond and the record goes to November 29, 2004 which was just 200 nanoseconds shy of a perfect 86400 second day.

>> 

>> How much better would be if we'd adapted a mean solar second of 1900 instead of 1820 which we wound up with?

> 

> See Steve's plot:

> 

> 	http://ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/lod.pdf

> 

> or the top plot of http://ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/amsci.html, zoomed to recent decades.

> 

> The Earth would be deemed fast by about 4 ms / days  (five millionths of a percent if I've got the decimal right).

> 

> What is "better" or "perfect" here is a matter of debate.


For the purposes of my question "better" means "lower rate of leap second introduction for the next few decades"

Warner


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