[LEAPSECS] drift of TAI

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Mon Sep 15 10:50:32 EDT 2008


In message <cb07d04cda3f9f6971383889137ead54.squirrel at rubidium.dyndns.org>, "Ma
gnus Danielson" writes:


>Everything is arbitrary as base scale and division.


Uhm no.

All bases larger than 2 are arbitrary and all scalings are arbitrary.

But base 2 represents the fundamental counting system, and as such is
is unique.

This has been acknowledged since Leibnitz.

However, following the subsequent mathematical proof that the choice
of base makes no difference to any kind of math, apart from expense
of ink and paper to write the numbers, base-2 was left alone until
somebody much later got the heritical idea to drive thermionic
valves way pas their linear behaviour.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.


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