[LEAPSECS] Letters Blogatory

[Brooks Harris]

Overall he seems to make a good philosophical argument why solar time is 
good for humans. But his conclusion seems confused.

"... let the airlines and the Internet companies use TAI".

Ah, the airlines already use GPS (TAI-like) for navigation, and "local 
civil time" for scheduling, while the "internet companies" grapple with 
TAI-like timescales, POSIX, and "local civil time" representations at 
machine and human levels. There's atomic time and solar time and thats 
the inconvenient truth that TAI v.s. UTC with Leap Seconds reconciles. 
That's the whole point.

"In other words, let them simply stop adjusting for for leap seconds. 
Let the atomic clocks become progressively more wrong."

Whoa! Hold the phone! What do you mean? Adjust TAI's frequency to match 
Earth?!? Nobody anywhere is suggesting that! Of does he mean adjust the 
count or labeling of TAI? Nobody's suggesting that either. That's what 
UTC is.

"It seems to me we have our priorities backwards when we worry about how 
to keep our everyday natural time in sync with our atomic clocks instead 
of vice versa!"

Huh? I think he means the solar day ought to be the priority because its 
more meaningful for humans, which I generally agree with. But this is an 
argument to "keep Leap Seconds", not change TAI. He seems to have missed 
the fact he himself makes earlier that there are two timescales. 
Articles like that add confusion to the public discussion.

-Brooks



On 2015-03-11 09:44 AM, Steve Allen wrote:
> Ted Folkman is a lawyer who blogs about international law
>
> https://lettersblogatory.com/2015/03/11/letters-blogatory-opposes-abolition-of-the-leap-second/#more-20126
>
> --
> Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
> UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB   Natural Sciences II, Room 165    Lat  +36.99855
> 1156 High Street            Voice: +1 831 459 3046           Lng -122.06015
> Santa Cruz, CA 95064        http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/     Hgt +250 m
> _______________________________________________
> LEAPSECS mailing list
> LEAPSECS at leapsecond.com
> https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
>
>