[ale] [OT] Date change proposal

[JK]

Jeff Lightner wrote:
> I've always wondered why in this age of technology we bother with time
> changes (daylight to standard and vice-versa) and leap years?   We
> should be able to program things to make minute adjustments ever morning
> at 2 AM so that we never have to notice that the time is changing at
> all.

While DST is totally a human invention, leap-day reflects a natural 
process that would be hard to account for in any other systematic
way than adding an integral day to the calendar periodically.
Distributing leap-day uniformly over calendar days would involve adding
59.178 seconds to each day.  After two months the time of sunrise would
be an hour earlier, and after two years noon would occur approximately
at solar nadir.  Might confuse the livestock.

-- JK

-- 
I do not particularly want to go where the money is -
  it usually does not smell nice there. -- A. Stepanov