[LEAPSECS] happy anniversary pips

[Kevin Birth]

The problem with adding an hour is when and where it is added.  If the
hour was added at the midnight at the prime meridian, it would be
disruptive to rush hour and work schedules for most of the world's
population.  A critical difference between the management of UTC and the
management of time zones is that time zone decisions are national and DST
shifts are locally scheduled, whereas adding a leap to UTC is globally
scheduled at a time that ignores that the Earth is a rotating globe and at
a location that is, quite frankly, a legacy of colonialism rather than
wisdom.

Best,

Kevin


Kevin K. Birth, Professor
Department of Anthropology
Queens College, City University of New York
65-30 Kissena Boulevard
Flushing, NY 11367
telephone: 718/997-5518

"We may live longer but we may be subject to peculiar contagion and
spiritual torpor or illiteracies of the imagination" --Wilson Harris

"Tempus est mundi instabilis motus, rerumque labentium cursus." --Hrabanus
Maurus





On 2/10/14 6:49 PM, "Warner Losh" <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:


>

>On Feb 10, 2014, at 4:24 PM, Rob Seaman wrote:

>

>> On Feb 10, 2014, at 9:57 AM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

>> 

>>> On Feb 10, 2014, at 9:02 AM, Rob Seaman wrote:

>>> 

>>>> Like I said, it is an attempt to confuse two different concepts.

>>> 

>>> We disagree here then. Atomic time is adequate for civil needs. The

>>>small divergence can be handled the same way we handle differences in

>>>time between the sun and the UT time now: time zones.

>> 

>> There hasn¹t been the slightest investment of systems engineering in

>>evaluating this notion of hiding variations in length of day in the

>>timezone system.  We had a cat once that liked to hide squirrel parts

>>under the doormat.  This is like that.

>> 

>> Note also that Tom Scott¹s rant is titled ³The Problem with Time &

>>Timezones²:

>> 

>> 	http://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY

>> 

>> Leap seconds are just a relish added at the end.  He clearly doesn¹t

>>perceive timezones as a solution, but rather as part of the problem.

>

>The leap forward or back an hour due to increasing out-of-syncness with

>the sun would be a drop in the bucket.

>

>>> These times zones would move on a scale of multiple decades or

>>>centuries.

>> 

>> It¹s almost as if the last decade-plus of discussions never happened.

>>Just continue to make the same empty unsupported assertion that doesn¹t

>>actually appear anywhere in the ITU proposal.  Please see many previous

>>messages on this topic.  Here I¹ll just note that these local updates

>>would be clustered into extended periods of great confusion.  This isn¹t

>>an issue of two dozen timezones, but rather of the thousands of local

>>jurisdictions that would be choosing what timezone to adhere to.  Some

>>would toggle back-and-forth for decades during these transitional

>>centuries as different political parties take power.

>

>Pure speculation on your part. And also irrelevant. These are sovereign

>states.

>

>>> This would suffice to keep the clocks on the wall aligned to the sun

>>>in the sky to the same error as we have today.

>> 

>> This confuses the reporting of local time with the maintenance of the

>>underlying global timescale.  Future historians would curse our names

>>for introducing vast uncertainty into future chronologies.  Predictions

>>of future events (say, solar eclipses) would be unable to engage with a

>>local time that might differ +/- one hour rather than a few seconds.

>

>The same problem exists with leap seconds...

>

>> Equating this with daylight saving time is a particular red herring

>>since only a small fraction of world participates in any of the

>>variations of DST, but also since these changes wouldn¹t be matched by a

>>seasonal readjustment half a year later.  Each locality would be

>>applying leverage to their particular timezone, but the timezone as a

>>whole would have fuzzy edges, perhaps extending all the way through to

>>the next era of confusion.

>

>I engaged in no such red herring.

>

>>> It moves the alignment from one part of the system to the other. It

>>>doesn't confuse any concepts at all, but rather properly applies them

>>>to an alternative solution.

>> 

>> It certainly confuses the concepts that describe the actual physical

>>situation.  And instead of keeping track of a single monotonic list of

>>leap seconds, all software would have to track vast numbers of worldwide

>>lists of local timezone peccadillos.  A single Olson tz database might

>>no longer suffice since it would have to be normalized against

>>individual tables for cities and counties, let alone countries and

>>continents.  And pray, what happens in such a situation to the concepts

>>of the prime meridian and the international date line?  I presume we¹re

>>to assume they stay put?  Why should they?

>

>It does not confuse anything. And you overstate the effects relative to

>other timezone effects. The timezone decisions would be made on a

>national level, just like they are today. Salt Lake City and Denver are

>on the same time, even though the sun sets half an hour later in SLC.

>

>> And for that matter I¹m skeptical that it doesn¹t confuse those few

>>concepts you appear to care about.  You¹d be requiring a complex tz

>>schema (much more complex than currently) be added to many classes of

>>software that simply get by with ambient UTC now.

>

>How so. I don't understand this at all. You add an hour or not after the

>difference gets large enough to care, and that process operates on a time

>scale of decades or centuries.

>

>>> I get that people don't like this, and that there's some resistance to

>>>it on aesthetic grounds dressed up in the guise of technical arguments

>>>about universal not meaning what it has always meant, and that

>>>entrenched interests aren't unhappy enough with the status quo to risk

>>>changes...

>> 

>> 

>> Oh, if only I could lay claim to being an entrenched aesthete :-)

>> 

>> You don¹t like arguments about Universal Time needing to continue to

>>denote the same term of art it always has?  ISO disagreed with you

>>enough to send a technical committee chair from Hong Kong to Washington,

>>DC:

>> 

>> 

>>	http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/futureofutc/aas223/presentations/2-1-ISOterm

>>inologyAAS.pdf

>> 

>> Before it is used as implicit justification for redefining time

>>policies worldwide, the ITU really ought to back it up with something

>>more than ³Hey, that sounds plausible!"

>

>Also irrelevant. I said Atomic Time can be the basis for Civil time.

>Universal Time never entered into it, other than being displaced as the

>basis for Civil Time. It would exist, unchanged, like it has existed in

>all its various flavors. As the understanding of time has increased,

>we've gone from local time to UT to a plethera of UT (UT0, UT1, UT2) as

>well as UTC. Apart from some naming issues with the new Atomic Time

>(which you bogusly bring up here: I made no such assertions about the

>name of the new Atomic Time), Universal time would continue. Newcomb's

>equations would still be useful, and you'd just have a new difference

>between UTx and Atomic time. These numbers could easily be published for

>people getting only an Atomic Time stream who need to know the delta from

>UTx, and systems could be written to emulate the current broadcast of UTC

>if systems need to be fed with that info directly.

>

>My basic argument is that we can coordinate on atomic time, base civil

>time on that and synchronize to the sun with an offset to the time zones

>that sovereign states use today to determine what they want their people

>to use.

>

>Warner

>_______________________________________________

>LEAPSECS mailing list

>LEAPSECS at leapsecond.com

>http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs