[LEAPSECS] Solar time: From mean solar days, to mean solar years

Clive D.W. Feather clive at davros.org
Thu Aug 21 03:06:06 EDT 2014


Warner Losh said:
> Absolutely. We get leap days right because we don?t have to hear from the pope?s astronomers every year to know if it will be a leap year or not. We know for thousands of years.

And note that it was exactly that problem that led Caius Julius to reform
the calendar in the first place.

[...]
> Another thing we could do is [...]

Or we could decouple UTC from GMT and allow each country to decide when to
change its offset. That subsumes the whole problem into the summer/winter
time switch, or the "move past the International Date Line" switch, that
the whole world knows how to handle, even if they don't all do it.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather          | If you lie to the compiler,
Email: clive at davros.org     | it will get its revenge.
Web: http://www.davros.org  |   - Henry Spencer
Mobile: +44 7973 377646


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