This will actually make sense once (if ever) we become a spacefaring culture, and are no longer tied to the rotation rate of the earth. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time, section /In popular culture/.
Leslie Turriff MO ITSD -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2011 09:21 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Out damn'd GMT ... On Thu, 3 Nov 2011 20:40:00 +1100, Shane Ginnane wrote: >This would be primarily for the gratification of gil: > http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-03/time-for-change-gmt-could-be-history/3617226 > Wherein I read: ... "We are starting to have parallel definitions of time. Imagine a world where there were two or three definitions of a kilogram." Imagine a world where there were two or three definitions of a pint. ... That would see atomic time slowly diverge from GMT, by about one minute every 60 to 90 years, or by an hour every 600 years, and there would need to be "leap minutes" a couple of times a century to bring the two in line. At a quadratically increasing rate. Right; let our grandchildren deal with the problem. A pernicious compromise: either abandon Earth Rotation Time or stick with UTC; don't just introduce a third standard. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
