I find it surprising, as we are debating issues relating to high-precision
time, that the discussion has not mentioned that UTC is periodically adjusted
so as to track mean solar time - so that not all days have 86400 seconds in
them. Is care taken in the algorithms to insert the intercalary leap seconds at
the appropriate points? TAI and GPS (19 seconds apart) don't use leap seconds
according to Wikipedia. There is a (current) proposal to phase out leap seconds
in UTC.
Steve Loch
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