[LEAPSECS] Leap Seconds schedule prior to 1972

[John Sauter]

On Thu, 2016-04-21 at 15:03 -0700, Tom Van Baak wrote:

> Hi John,
> 
> Given that your pUTC is pure fiction, though possibly useful fiction,
> did you consider a simple polynomial fit of the Morrison and
> Stephenson data, instead of those hideous, every-one-is-different,
> per-century and per-decade pseudo leap second tables of yours?
> 
> I'll try to put my finger on it, but there's something troubling
> about taking a table that clearly contains numbers of very low
> precision and then creating a table with algorithms and dates of high
> resolution.
> 
> I have more comments too, but let's start with this one.
> 
> Thanks,
> /tvb

Hi Tom,

The values presented in the 2004 Morrison and Stephenson paper are
already smoothed using a series of cubic splines and a parabola prior
to -700.  See their table 1 and its discussion.  The authors
recommended simple interpolation between the listed years, so I did
that rather than add additional smoothing.

To me, the only troubling thing about creating a high-precision
representation of low-precision data is the implication that the result
has greater accuracy than its source.  I attempted to address that in
my conclusion by stating that the choice of extraordinary days in
ancient times is somewhat arbitrary.
    John Sauter (John_Sauter at systemeyescomputerstore.com)

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