On Mon, 28 Apr 2003, Rob Seaman wrote:
> An obvious hole in the LEAPSECS discussion to date is any coherent analysis
> of the design of the entire civil time system - either today's system or
> the system that some seek to replace it with. We have had various good
> specific exchanges such as the current DNS notions, but never even the
> hint of an end-to-end design that meets the purposes of a single user
> community - let alone a design that will meet the needs of the very large
> number of communities that any change to the UTC standard will affect.
In this context the proceedings of the 1884 Meridian Conference
(International conference held at Washington for the purpose of fixing a
prime meridian and a universal day, October 1884: protocols of the
proceedings; published Washington, 1884) are well worth reading, still
very interesting, and much better argued than some of the reasoning
apparently saying we must discard UTC now. The delegates there very
clearly knew that they could only recommend, and it would be up to the
governments that sent them to decide whether they did wish to adopt the
new Prime Meridian.
I've been vaguely intending for some time to make these proceedings
available online (probably via Distributed Proofreaders), but don't know
when I'll get round to it.
--
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28_at_cam.ac.uk
Received on Mon Apr 28 2003 - 11:55:03 PDT