In message <Pine.GSO.4.58.0701031137001.17452_at_cass03>, Peter Bunclark writes:
>> Without the Moon, the Earth could nod through large angles, lying on
>> its side or perhaps even rotating retrograde every few million
>> years. Try making sense of timekeeping under such circumstances.
You mean like taking a sequence of atomic seconds, counting them
in a predicatable way and be happy that timekeeping has nothing
to do with geophysics ?
Yeah, I could live with that.
>Hang on a minute, statistically planets in the Solar System do not have a
>large moon and yet are "upright"; for example Mars comes very close to the
>conditions required to generate a leapseconds email exploder.
As far as I know the atmosphere is far to cold for that :-)
--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
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Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Received on Wed Jan 03 2007 - 03:56:12 PST