[LEAPSECS] The definition of a day

[Athena Madeleina]

Cultural aspects have been been used as debating points in these
discussions.  Culture is being used to justify the abuse of women, so
it is important to understand what it means and what it does not mean.
  I have found two things that culture means with regards to the leap
second.

First, anthropologist Kevin Birth suggests that one cultural aspect is
nationalism, which is not entirely English.  He says a British
minister warned that without leap seconds time will move to America,
and also that the French never did accept GMT.   Dr. Matsakis's
viewgraphs say that UTC is referred to as GMT in the British media,
and that nationalistic reasoning was part of the British public
debate.   In an email last year, Dr. Birth suggests that some elements
of the third world might be favorably disposed towards the ITU
resolution because they see it as anti-colonialist.

Some of the other emails make it seem like another cultural aspect
would arise if people's daily lives were altered with respect to the
sun.   Here other people say there are no more cultural aspects to
this than happens now when countries change time zones.  That is
either because countries can adjust by switching their time zone
definitions every many-hundred (or thousand) years, or because people
will get so used to the clock readings being different as they go
about their daily lives that they won't want to adjust.    People have
accused those against leap seconds of deliberately ignoring
predictions that the divergence will be less rapid than previously
thought.

Is there anything else to the cultural aspects besides these two elements?


On 1/30/15, Rob Seaman <seaman at noao.edu> wrote:
> On Jan 30, 2015, at 8:41 AM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
>> Rob loves to quote the archives as if they irrefutably prove his point.
>
> My point is that a coherent approach to systems engineering would be the
> most efficient and robust way to resolve the issue.  Is this controversial?
> And rather, I choose not to ignore the fact that this conversation has been
> going on for many years and that we have already covered many topics in
> great detail.  The list archives are a great source of information and
> analysis from diverse people, which is why we linked to them from
> http://futureofutc.org
>
>> The biggest thing that’s ignored in them is that time zone can and do
>> change all the time.
>
> They do not accelerate secularly.  And the underlying Universal Time can be
> recovered to tie the whole carousel of time zones together.
>
> Rob
>
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