[LEAPSECS] presentations from AAS Future of Time sessions

[Steve Allen]

On Sat 2014-01-18T07:18:01 +0000, Clive D.W. Feather hath writ:

> > Will the delegates from other nations

> > simply reject a proposal which is rooted in and strongly pushed by the

> > military needs of the USA?

>

> What's the basis of this assertion?


The admonition from USNO to its folks attending the AAS splinter
meeting two weeks ago.  PHK's Jan 10 report on the talk at USNO.
The 2009-06-29 memo from the Assistant Secretary of Defense.
Other communications over the past decade.

Switching to the word "universal", it was a trendy millenialist word
in the common vocabulary of the late 19th century.  1500 years earlier
the word would have been "catholic", but Constantine set up the
downfall of that word by moving to the Golden Horn of the Bosporus,
and then there was Luther.  "Universal" got its common meaning
rearranged when Hubble confirmed that Curtis was right about the
"island universes".

About redefining a new nomenclature for time scales that applies
to the past and future, it is totally irrelevant to the ITU-R.
The ITU-R's only options are:
    UTC with leap seconds (status quo)
and
    a new time scale which is continuous in value to the current
    UTC at the instant of change from old to new (no leap at
    the transition)
Any analysis more complicated than that falls into the ITU-R category
of "Somebody Else's Problem".  Unlike IETF standards-track RFCs, the
ITU-R issued the original Recommendation 460 with no existing
implementation at all, let alone two interoperable ones.

--
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