[LEAPSECS] the big artillery

[Dennis Ferguson]

> On Nov 6, 2014, at 11:19, Clive D.W. Feather <clive at davros.org> wrote:
> 
> Tony Finch said:
>>> "minutes" and "seconds" are fractions of 60 and have been so since
>>> babylonian times for minutes and since 13-mumble for seconds.
>> 
>> The etymology is actually helpful in this case rather than misleading as
>> etymologies so often are.
>> 
>> "minute" is short for "pars minuta prima", the first small part
>> "second" is short for "pars minuta secunda", the second small part
> 
> And I've seen "third" and "fourth", with the obvious meaning, used in old
> documents.
> 
> But etymology doesn't override present meanings.

It isn't really a question of what present meanings are, but of whether they are
a good idea or not.  If the hectosecond were redefined to sometimes be 99 or 101
seconds, with a table lookup required to find out which kind you were in, I wouldn't
think that was a good idea even if it did fix a problem someone was having.

In some ways the UTC minute redefinition is even worse than that.  A 6 year old
might not know how many seconds are in a hectosecond but would often be
expected to know there are 60 seconds in a minute.  Redefining this to be otherwise
seems bound to cause cognitive dissonance in many grown up former 6 year olds.

Dennis Ferguson