[time-nuts] Leap second? Yay or nay?

Bill Hawkins bill at iaxs.net
Mon Jul 2 18:29:25 UTC 2012


Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
"Just make everybody use TAI and make T-O-D alignment a cultural
 thing rather than a numerological superstition?"

No. Not every body - every computer.

Let the fragile, programmer-bound computer systems, like transaction
time-stamping for high frequency stock trading, use TAI (or any
monotonically increasing method of marking time).

Let every human interface to such data translate TAI to the local
time zone, seasonal time offset, and earth rotation offset.

The data will always be in increasing time order, no matter what
the translator does. The original timestamps may be viewed directly
when local time does not matter.

It works for trending analog process data in manufacturing plants
that observe seasonal time (not all US states do).

Bill Hawkins

P.S. During the manufactured oil crisis of 1974, that started us on
the path to multinational corps that are large enough to challenge
national governments for power, the DST dates were extended to *save
energy*. Not even the deaths of school children walking in the dark
to a bus stop were able to restore the system that worked.

As to shifting a minute a day for seasonal time, the first reason for
standardizing time was railroad transportation with multiple use of
the same track coupled with the cost of printing train schedules.

P.P.S I make this suggestion because I have no idea what makes people
so upset with the idea of time corrections. Humans are involved, so
there will always be corrections. Julian dating was a correction.



-----Original Message-----
From: Poul-Henning Kamp
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2012 8:19 AM

Jim Lux writes:

>which is an interesting thing.. if instead of DST (for which I think 
>there's little practical reason to have in the first place).. say you 
>just shifted the clock one minute earlier or later each day, gradually 
>moving it to the new alignment relative to solar day.

Why bother ?

Just make everybody use TAI and make T-O-D alignment a cultural
thing rather than a numerological superstition ?






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