[LEAPSECS] leapseconds, converting between GPS time (week, second) and UTC

Steve Allen sla at ucolick.org
Tue Jan 15 15:22:27 EST 2019


On Tue 2019-01-15T12:52:18-0700 Warner Losh hath writ:
> This suggests strongly that those models of time are fatally flawed and
> should be revisited.

I am probably the only person who has ever read all of Bulletin Horaire.
https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/bhissues.html
I can say that with certainty for the copies in the Lick library because
I had to apply xacto knife to separate some of the pages which were
not cut at the time of printing and never opened before I did.

Over the lifetime of the BIH the staff were prone to be chatty and
include transcriptions of the meetings which many times resulted in
directions that the BIH must do more work in a different fashion.
Those transcriptions point to the dramatis personae at those and other
meetings, and to other documents.

I can say unequivocally that the people who instituted leap seconds in
radio broadcast time signals knew that the idea was fatally flawed.
They also knew that they did not have the legal authority *not* to
include leap seconds in the radio broadcast time signals, and they
were not happy about the situation.

They intentionally did not use UTC in their ongoing technical work.
They intentionally avoided discussing the technical problems in
public, redacted the transcripts of meetings that showed dissension,
and arranged forced votes to produce statements indicating that
various bodies agreed with the notion of leap seconds.

--
Steve Allen                    <sla at ucolick.org>              WGS-84 (GPS)
UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260  Natural Sciences II, Room 165  Lat  +36.99855
1156 High Street               Voice: +1 831 459 3046         Lng -122.06015
Santa Cruz, CA 95064           https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/  Hgt +250 m


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