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Saturday, February 14th, 2009 12:13 am (UTC)
OMG, the leap-second list (http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs). Basically there are two entrenched camps, software folks who would like leap-seconds to be abandoned entirely because they cause expensive problems, and astronomers who react with horror at the idea of civil time being permanently decoupled from earth time. The list is quiet for long stretches between flare-ups, which involve hundreds of messages a day for a few days, mostly rehashing existing positions.

Also, there's a huge amount of pedantry, because the history, politics and consequences of time-scales turn out to be more complicated than one might imagine.

There's a certain amount of overlap with the time-nuts mailing list (which I'm not on), for people who are into constructing seriously accurate clocks (generally accurate enough that they get corrected for leap-seconds).

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