[LEAPSECS] USWP7A docs for 2013 September meetings

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 14 August 2013 10:04, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:

>>The easiest way to eliminte them is to remove them. However, I differ

>>from Poul-Henning however in that I don't find it palatable to ignore

>>the fact that humans define days by the Sun.

>

> I certainly don't ignore that.

>

> Quite the contrary, I spent some time researching exactly what that

> means.

>

> The result was that most humans live perfectly comfortable lives

> with the sun being 1-1.5 hours "off" from solar time, due to timezones

> and daylight savings times.


You smipped the rest of the paragraph:
"We all know that time doesn't follow that definition exactly, but
over the long term, the definition has always stood and has real
meaning to  non-technical humans."

ie. the actual offset of an individual to the day, and the variance of
that is clearly a larger factor in peoples lives than leapsecs. But
when averaged out over the long term, the day is still defined by the
Sun.

Its that underlying fact that cannot just be swept under the carpet.
Any abolition proposal must be crystal clear on how the increasing
deviation from the underlying day would be handled.

Stephen