[LEAPSECS] How good could civil timekeeping be?

[Rob Seaman]

> Because I live in the real world.


POSIX is indeed a facet of the world we've built.  I might argue that  
better system engineering practices might have avoided its  
limitations :-) but we have to deal with the technology we've inherited.

Note, however, that the actual real world is part of the real world,  
too.  I'll restrain myself from waxing too poetic here since it seems  
to drive some people crazy, but facts like weather, and natural  
resource limits, and all the ideas in Jared Diamond's books, and solar  
effects on communications, and lightning strikes, and the difficulties  
facing oceanic cables, and - yes - the fact that we live on a  
rotating, orbiting platform do indeed continue to impinge on our  
civilization.  One could argue that these effects are increasingly  
evident.

Throw out all the rest of the system engineering best practices that  
for some reason also seem to be controversial.  Might it not be  
prudent to actually perform a risk analysis of key technologies such  
as transportation, communication and pipelines to look for failure  
modes associated with the sought eradication of mean solar time?  I  
mean - like before actually eradicating it?

A dearth of imagination as to how such dependencies could possibly  
exist is not a logical refutation.  Whereas we have several decades of  
evidence that leap seconds are survivable if proper precautions are  
taken, such as seeking shelter underground every New Year's Eve,  
stockpiling canned goods, and keeping candles and Y2K certified  
matches at the ready :-)

Rob Seaman
NOAO