[LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?

[Kevin Birth]

For most of human history there were no global time standards.  In Europe,
many city states had their own distinctive times--Nuremberg Time, Italian
Time, Bohemian Time . . .

The first wave of global standards were implemented by colonialism and
empire.  

Implementing global standards without the power of empire is unprecedented
in human history.  Trying to devise a standard that satisfies the
diversity of human behaviors is particularly difficult, particularly when
there is nobody on the planet who knows the diversity of human
behaviors--even among those of us who specialize in the study of such
diversity.  

Cheers,

Kevin 



Kevin K. Birth, Professor
Department of Anthropology
Queens College, City University of New York
65-30 Kissena Boulevard
Flushing, NY 11367
telephone: 718/997-5518

"We may live longer but we may be subject to peculiar contagion and
spiritual torpor or illiteracies of the imagination" --Wilson Harris

"Tempus est mundi instabilis motus, rerumque labentium cursus." --Hrabanus
Maurus





On 10/1/14 8:02 AM, "Greg Hennessy" <greg.hennessy at cox.net> wrote:

>> But the basic point still remains: If you have to sugar coat the actual
>>standard
>> with a fake standard to paper-over people¹s inability to deal with the
>>actual
>> standard, this suggests that you have the wrong actual standard.
>
>I would agree that we have the wrong actual standard. We've had leap
>seconds since 1972, but POSIX still mandates we ignore the leap seconds
>in places. It would be nice if the standards and the practices match.
>Some people want to change the standards, and others want to change
>the practices.
>
>
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