Rob Seaman scripsit:
> "Ad hoc" is not a synonym for secular. I'm pleased to see someone
> other than the astronomers in this conversation using the word secular,
> but there continues to be a fundamental confusion of Daylight Saving
> clock adjustments (periodic) with the silly notion of leap hours
> (fundamentally secular).
Not by me. There have been genuinely secular changes in zone, call
them silly or not: Pacific/Enderbury (Phoenix Islands Time) changed
its time zone from -11:00 to +13:00 in 1995, and Asia/Kashgar (extreme
western China) changed its time zone from -5:00 to -8:00 in 1980-05
(its LMT is 5:03:56).
> No reasonable standard can be based on constraining the behavior of our
> descendants 600 years hence.
They are only constrained in the sense that Pope Gregory was constrained
by the decisions of Julius Caesar. By 2600 we may simply not care about
the apparent position of the sun (or anything else, perhaps).
--
John Cowan jcowan_at_reutershealth.com www.reutershealth.com www.ccil.org/~cowan
[R]eversing the apostolic precept to be all things to all men, I usually [before
Darwin] defended the tenability of the received doctrines, when I had to do
with the [evolution]ists; and stood up for the possibility of [evolution] among
the orthodox -- thereby, no doubt, increasing an already current, but quite
undeserved, reputation for needless combativeness. --T. H. Huxley
Received on Thu Feb 24 2005 - 10:37:45 PST