RE: [LEAPSECS] what should a time standard encompass?

From: Seeds, Glen <Glen.Seeds_at_COGNOS.COM>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 18:51:29 -0500

Although this is (as Ken says) a long and somewhat rambling dissertation, I
agree with almost all of the points made (many of which I haven't seen yet
in this forum).

The one statement that I have some concerns about is this one:
> (3) Searching for a better way of addressing the two major categories
> of precision time needs that UTC attempts to reconcile,
> ... is what I had originally
> hoped LEAPSECS would be about. Alas, it appears to not be. :-(

I'm not aware that there are "two major categories of precision time needs".
As I see it, there is only one category of (absolute) precision time need,
which is satisfied by TAI. UTC and its derivatives are useful for civil
time, not because they are precise, but because they are derived from TAI.

That means that we need only one real-time broadcast time instead of many,
because applications that need the others can derive them from TAI with the
addition of publicly available and agreed-on information from non-real-time
sources.

  /glen

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Pizzini [mailto:ken_at_HALCYON.COM]
Sent: January 24, 2003 6:00 AM
To: LEAPSECS_at_ROM.USNO.NAVY.MIL
Subject: [LEAPSECS] what should a time standard encompass?


On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 08:10:56AM -0700, Rob Seaman wrote:
> If there is a change to the civil time standard (currently UTC),
> a prudent suggestion might be that the legal and technical precision
> of the standard should be improved, not simply left for our
> grandchildren's grandchildren to figure out.

I've seen you make statements of this ilk, that we should be making
civil time definitions more precise rather than less, a few times.
However I continue to be in the dark as to how the issues of precision
timekeeping relate to the needs of a civil time standard. Civil time
should be precise relative to what metric?

...

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Received on Fri Jan 24 2003 - 15:54:55 PST