[LEAPSECS] "China move could call time on GMT"

[Warner Losh]

On Jan 4, 2012, at 10:57 AM, Steve Allen wrote:


> On Wed 2012-01-04T17:49:42 +0000, Tony Finch hath writ:

>> GMT was discontinued decades ago and has not had a coherent meaning for

>> even longer.

> 

> That's the sound bite that reporters can chew.  The articles talk

> about disconnecting the clock from the sun, but really that happened

> 40 years ago.  The draft proposal before the ITU-R is about

> disconnecting the calendar from the sun.


Can you explain this more?  The current calendar is good to about 20k-30k years only.  The ITU-R proposal will add about 2-3 days to the drift of the calendar in this time frame in how we recon the time (if I'm recalling the estimates right), but due to rounding we'll have drifted off a similar amount in that time.

Warner