[LEAPSECS] Straw men

[Warner Losh]

On Jan 11, 2012, at 4:59 AM, Tom Van Baak wrote:


> > When was the _rate_ of UTC such that 86400s == 1 mean solar day?

> >

> > ian

> Ian,

> 

> Although on average LOD is more than 86400 s by a few milliseconds, in the past fifty years about 3% of the days have been shorter than 86400 s. In the past decade alone the figure is 14% (the earth has sped up quite a bit the past decade). You can imagine then that some days must be rather close to no error.

> 

> Five days were within 1 microsecond and the record goes to November 29, 2004 which was just 200 nanoseconds shy of a perfect 86400 second day.


How much better would be if we'd adapted a mean solar second of 1900 instead of 1820 which we wound up with?

Warner


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