[LEAPSECS] leap second roundup 2017

[Steve Allen]

On Tue 2017-10-24T19:32:31+0000 Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ:
> The parallel is not as convincing as you may think.  Back then, the people
> who worked with stuff where it made a difference knew what they were doing,
> being generally people with "phd." after their name.

Alas, the history says that way too many of the PhDs did not.  There
are lots of astronomers who wrote down their concept of origin and
meaning of the new second but turned out not to understand what the
new value of the second actually represented.  Sadler is nearly alone on
record expressing the opinion that the leap second was a bad idea,
everybody else thought it was the perfect solution.

> If you tried to 'fix' things by adding a timescale now, 99.9% of the
> people who needed to react are not clued.

So it is important that documents which make a change include
detailed discussions of best understandings of implications.
But that has never been the case, and the documents being submitted to
WP7A this week continue the tradition of not explaining the whole story.

--
Steve Allen                    <sla at ucolick.org>              WGS-84 (GPS)
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