On Jan 21, 2011, at 5:05 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
GMT still exists as a legal construct and could well prove useful since it is
ultimately under control of HMG, quite possibly it can be modified by as
little as an order in council.
So if HMG would eliminate the inanity of leap seconds in GMT we could
probably move most computer systems back to GMT rather than UTC as a
reference point.
The idea that there is utility in leap seconds is ridiculous. Most
astronomers I have talked to tell me that UTC is useless for their purposes
anyway and the time of mid-day varies at Greenwich by 5 minutes over the
course of a year so what does it matter which two days are right?
UTC is kept close to UT1 for celestial navigation, not astronomy, and is indeed
somewhat archaic. (The idea was that you could use UTC, i.e., civil time, as
reported by a simple radio, and then do celestial navigation to get within
about 1 km of your true location. You still can, but that is of
less and less utility as navigation moves to GPS and time keeping becomes ever
better.)
The time of mid-day is solar time, which does vary in a periodic fashion during
the year, driven by the Earth's orbital motion. These variations are not shared
by mean solar time, which is now-a-days really an atomic time.
Regards
Marshall
On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 3:56 PM, Marshall Eubanks
<tme(_at_)americafree(_dot_)tv> wrote:
On Jan 21, 2011, at 3:48 PM, Clint Chaplin wrote:
Hey, Paris lobbied heavily to have the Prime Meridian be fixed in Paris.
That would have really made them the center of the navigational world.
Yes, and then they got the BIH, which got them the power to change GMT to
UTC. (GMT no longer has any official existence.)
Marshall
On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 12:37 PM, todd glassey
<tglassey(_at_)earthlink(_dot_)net> wrote:
On 1/21/2011 10:22 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 11:10 AM, Ole Jacobsen <ole(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>
wrote:
Does anyone see the irony of us even discussing concerns about, of all
things, FOOD when it comes to Paris?
What else is there to discuss in Paris?
Making Paris the center of the world - ever look at French Navigation
Charts - relative to Admiralty charts from any other nation?
Todd
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Principal Engineer
Corporate Standardization (US)
SISA
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