Big Ben's Silence Baffles Engineers

For further information, I recommend reading The Future of Leap Seconds.

Hmm... seems like things get sorta muddy. Perhaps it would have been simpler to just do some teraforming to shift the mass of the planet toward the poles [and thus toward the axis] so as to speed up the earth's rotation slightly [conservation of angular momentum]. Personally, I find myself thinking that the preferred approach from an administrative perspective would be to specify that on select days the system clock should run at 86,400/86,401 of normal speed. This would result in a worst-case delta-time error between timestamps of well under 0.002% [e.g. two timestamps that seemed to be an hour apart would in fact be about an hour and 0.04 seconds apart], whereas other methods of trying to keep computer time in sync with wall time could result in an error of a second over even a very short interval that spanned midnight.

Another thing I was wondering: why does the Windows timestamp format use as its epoch a date before calendars were standardized? It seems rather strange that a timestamp format would accept dates far before any file that could conceivably use them [did Woz think anyone would be importing data files from 1904 onto a Macintosh?] Going back so far that dates aren't standardized, however, seems downright bizarre. Given a time stamp date 100,000 days before midnight January 1, 2000, UTC, how should a Windows program intelligently convert that into a calendar date?

A calendrical system is best understood as a uniform, coherent and continuous system of counting days since an epoch as a number of years, months and days, such that there can be no ambiguity as to the result of converting a date designation into a count of days since the epoch, nor any ambiguity about converting a count of days since the epoch into a date designation, nor any ambiguity about the epoch date itself.

A calendrical system is not just a cultural artifact, it's also a formally well-defined system for interpreting a count of days since an epoch date as a number of years, months and days, and also for interpreting a count of years, months and days as a count of days since an epoch date. Mathematically, the counting system is applicable to any count of days since the calendar's epoch date (positive or negative,) and to any count of years, months and days (positive or negative.)

A person who just wants to express or understand a count of time using the calendrical system with which he is familiar cares not at all whether using his preferred calendar to represent a date (that is, "to count time as a number of years, months and days, according to the rules of a calendar') would be either anachronistic or culturally out of context. For example, the fact that no one alive in what we call the year 46 BC would have labeled that year using any variation whatsoever of "negative 46" does not lessen the utility of the modern practice of labeling that year using a proleptic year ordinal (interestingly, even historians do this.) For the same reason, when discussing events in China in the year 1000 AD, westerners (including western historians) prefer to use Julian dates, in spite of the fact that virtually no one in China at that time would have used Julian Calendar dates.

If someone says "45 BC", what they mean is, basically, "about 2,045 years before the year commonly known as 2000". I do not think people generally refer to dates like "February 27, 45 BC" [though actually I have somewhere a Bible transation that seems to like to do exactly that].

Perhaps dates should best be stored as a multi-part entity with the number of days before or after some epoch along with the ordinal date of the last March 1 on preceding the given date (and, for dealing with modern times and leep seconds, store the ordinal second-count of the most recent midnight).

Fredrick Forsythe is an author. I'll go with the people who made the bloody thing.

http://www.whitechapelbellfoundry.co.uk/bigben.htm

At 9'-0" diameter, 7'-6" high, and weighing in at 13 tons 10 cwts 3 qtrs 15lbs (13,760 Kg), the hour bell of the Great Clock of Westminster - known worldwide as 'Big Ben' - is the most famous bell ever cast at Whitechapel. This picture, painted by William T. Kimber, the head moulder responsible for casting the bell, shows George Mears with his wife and daughter inspecting the casting prior to despatch. Big Ben was cast on Saturday 10th April 1858, but its story begins more than two decades earlier....

As noted, I'd no idea whether Forsythe was correct or not, but I do wonder at his (apparently, given your post) egregious error here. Most of the research that goes into his novels is really quite carefully done; Day of the Jackal was very nearly a rifle assassin's handbook, and the nuclear components in the bomb in Fourth Protocol are **exact** according to a nuclear physicist acquaintance.

Suppose it just goes to show, once again, that there is only ONE perfect author, eh?

FReegards!

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