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

[Rob Seaman]

Tony said:

	"I reckon the timezone fudge is workable for rate errors as large as 1e-5, which would imply a timezone change every 11 years."

The resulting discussion posits the very situation you're spurning.

More to the point the entire notion of playing musical chairs with the worldwide timezone system ignores the perpetual rate error that matters for astronomical and aerospace applications.  It happens to also not be realistic to expect civilians to shift to UTC+(N+1) every decade but more importantly this would do absolutely nothing to address the technical requirements.  It is purely a rhetorical gimmick to justify redefining UTC without having a plan for mitigating the resulting impacts.

Rob Seaman
National Optical Astronomy Observatory
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On Jan 6, 2012, at 11:53 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:


> In message <2B82F82A-C0C6-4697-BC05-DF3FDA13CC4E at noao.edu>, Rob Seaman writes:

> 

>> And then UTC-9, UTC-10, etc., decade after decade.

> 

> Somebody from approximately 8000 years in the future just landed

> their time-machine in my living-room and asked me to relay: "Tell

> my 320-times-great-granddad that he can save himself a lot of time

> by not trying to outguess how we will deal with timezones by the

> time DUT1 amounts to an hour per decade."