[LEAPSECS] Straw men

[mike cook]

Le 10/01/2012 08:18, Poul-Henning Kamp a écrit :

> Rob,

>

> To say that your unconvincing statement of conjecture as fact is getting

> a bit tiresome may be to understate the situation somewhat.

>

> If you start with the name, the word that sets UTC apart from all

> the other UTs is the word "coordinated".

>

> That word refers to the coordination between the nation states as

> organized under the United Nations.

As I understand it the meaning of "coordinated" in this context has 
precious little to do with nation states or the United Nations.
It denotes the efforts of numerous national labs , starting with the US 
and British, to coordinate frequency and epoch offsets for radio time 
transmission .

> Therefore UTC is not a mathematical timescale.

For something not mathematical , a lot of effort and money goes into 
calculating it. I Don't see, given my understanding above, what you are 
getting at here.

>

> Neither is it is a scientific timescale.

>

> Nor an astronomical timescale,

>

The same goes for these. UTC is UT1 with bounded error bars, I don't see 
what is either unscientific, or non astronomical with that.


The current attempt to degrade the definition of UTC is deliberately 
reducing the transmitted time information. We have the technology to 
provide more and better precision. All the data required by the 
different camps could be put on the same waves. So we could have our 
cake and eat it.
As there is no rush to change anything. We could take the time to 
identify requirements which satisfy pretty much all users and define 
coherent recommendations to cover them. By coherent, I mean to exclude 
references to undefined sources as seen in ITU-R 236/7 for example 
"disseminated by multiple sources." or polite requests to third party 
organisations such as " invites the IERS and the service providers of 
Global Navigation Satellite Systems to offer convenient access to values 
of UT1−UTC so that users have access to UT1."