9 Quotes by Dennis McCarthy

Biogeography typically trumps taxonomy and anticipates molecular phylogeny

Losing your ability to drive is one of the toughest things. It tells us we're not healthy, we're not young, we're not capable.

There is a philosophical feeling that abolishing the leap second results in greater decoupling of the time scale from rotation of the Earth, and that this is not a good thing. But we put up with daylight-savings time in the United States, and China has one time zone for the entire country. My own feeling is that we all live with departures.

I think you will be pleasantly surprised when you take a look at the plans in front of you.

At some point this will become so annoying that someone will want to change it. I'm quite confident that people are not going to be happy with multiple leap seconds per year.

There's no foolproof way to predict someone's ability to drive safely.

Eventually, you get to the point that the paradigm involved in this won't work. You've got to do something different. The addition of leap seconds is going to be an increasing nuisance for people who are counting on a time scale where a minute actually contains 60 seconds.

It will not be unusual to be putting in two of these per year if we were to continue with the present definition.

The concern is for the future. Within the next century, it's almost certain that there will be years when we're putting in two (seconds) per year.