[time-nuts] Why not TAI?

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Wed Aug 10 10:14:19 UTC 2011


In message <4E425909.7050309 at xtra.co.nz>, Bruce Griffiths writes:

>These "local'' versions of TAI -TAI(NPL), TAI(NIST) etc, are also paper 
>ensemble averages and only a coarse approximation of them is available 
>in real time.

This argument is pretty vacuous:

UTC is also a paper clock, and the real time approximations of it,
UTC(NPL), UTC(NIST) etc, are exactly as good or bad as their TAI
parallels.

In fact, they are by *definition* exactly as good or bad, because
UTC is defined as an integral number of seconds offset from TAI.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
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