[time-nuts] Why not TAI? (was: The future of UTC)

Magnus Danielson magnus at rubidium.dyndns.org
Wed Aug 10 18:42:15 UTC 2011


On 10/08/11 20:24, Michael Sokolov wrote:
> Poul-Henning Kamp<phk at phk.freebsd.dk>  wrote:
>
>> That is a very good question, the answers you get if you try to press
>> this point starts with handwaving and ends with "look, just don't, OK ?"
>
> And what happens if you ignore their edicts and do it anyway?  It's
> called Civil Disobedience.  Using TAI is just like refusing to give up
> your seat on a segregated bus.  Follow the example of Rosa Parks.
>
> My Dual Scale Timekeeper will recover TAI from GPS by adding a constant
> 19 s offset, and it will track and serve out TAI in addition to UTR.

Naturally, we all use Universal Atomic Time (UAT) defined to be UTC with 
subtracted leap seconds. That it just happends to align up with TAI is 
an accident we don't bother to inform the time-lords about.

Much of todays "proliferation of UTC" or whatever it is being called, is 
due to the need of a TAI-like scale in a number of systems due to 
technical reasons. The time-lords could have avoided that from the start 
by acknowledging that use of TAI would be as valid as the use of UTC, 
where UTC is better suited as "legal time" basis while TAI is better 
suited for internal time in systems. They now tries to bend UTC itself 
into a UTC or TAI derivate.

Cheersm
Magnus




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