Re: [LEAPSECS] Risks of change to UTC

From: Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn_at_CL.CAM.AC.UK>
Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2006 12:31:05 +0000

"Daniel R. Tobias" wrote on 2006-01-21 19:30 UTC:
> On 21 Jan 2006 at 10:11, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> > I maintain that for human activity, there's no need for leap seconds
> > at all. In each person's lifetime, the accumulated error is on the
> > order of a few minutes. Over generations, the problems with noon
> > drifting to 1pm can trivially be solved by moving the timezones that
> > civilian time uses.
>
> What about when that accumulated difference is over 24 hours, so the
> offset between solar-based time and atomic time is actually on the
> order of days?

Well, there is always the "Atomic Calendar" idea as one possible answer.

I hope I will not lead this mailing list into an endless loop by
pointing to the discussion we had here back in 2003 in an attempt to
answer exactly this question, but I believe you may find this old thread
particularly interesting:

  Unifying Atomic Time and the post-Gregorian calendar corrections
  http://www.mail-archive.com/leapsecs_at_rom.usno.navy.mil/msg00206.html

Markus

--
Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ || CB3 0FD, Great Britain
Received on Sun Jan 22 2006 - 04:31:20 PST

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