[LEAPSECS] Bloomberg announced its smear

[Steve Allen]

On Tue 2016-09-27T18:27:53 +0100, Peter Vince hath writ:
> However, these new problems, and the Azure systems disagreeing between
> countries, all comes back to what Warner said - scrapping leap seconds
> solves all these problems, at the expense of - with due respect to Rob,
> Steve. etc. - the astronomers having to increase the range of DUT1 on their
> software.

In 1970 and the years afterwards the records show that astronomers
said the leap second is a bad idea and will cause trouble.

In 1970 and the years afterwards the records show that folks from
physics labs and national radio time signal services represented the
leap second as the perfect solution to all problems, and then
proceeded to lobby national and international agencies to adopt it and
include it into specifications.

The discussion here has revisited subsequent situations where one size
does not fit all, for various technical, social, political, cultural
reasons.

A big problem is the perception that There Can Be Only One, which when
promulgated by people of authority evokes a queer parallel with the
Highlander series of movies and TV shows.  On the other hand, it is
clear that national radio broadcasts are constrained to transmit legal
time, and it is non-trivial to get governments and agencies to
understand the need for more than one legal time scale and change
their documents to approve such a thing.

The underlying time scale used by systems should be as precise as
technologically possible, and also as simple as possible.
Given that, all of the other applications for technical and political
preferences can be computed by a processor in a contemporary wristwatch.

I want to see the leaps gone from the radio broadcast time signals.
I do not see how to accomplish that without either
1) disconnecting calendar days from the rotation of earth
or
2) educating bureaucracies to understand more than one time scale

--
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