Re: [LEAPSECS] A lurker surfaces

From: Zefram <zefram_at_FYSH.ORG>
Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2007 21:35:09 +0000

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>By extension, that is why most calendar reform proprosals fall flat
>before they even get talked about: they tinker with details. If
>you want to reform calendars, do something radical so that people
>can see the difference clearly.

I wonder if this is why TAI hasn't caught on properly: we use time-of-day
notation for it. I prefer to deal with TAI (and, when appropriate,
TT) in the form of a linear count of seconds since the 1958 epoch.
My computer clock display has a field in that format (currently showing
1.546_464_427_5 Gs since the epoch). I'd probably get confused if I had
a time-of-day TAI display. (For much the same reason, I don't have a
UTC display. The only time-of-day display I have is the regional civil
time, presently equal to UTC.)

On the other hand, there's often a big resistance to accepting things
that look different. Basically, people are a problem.

-zefram
Received on Tue Jan 02 2007 - 13:35:28 PST