re: Date and Time

From: John (EBo) David (ebo_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-03-26 15:31:58

This is probably a slightly off subject, but one of the other posters
got me to thinking about a problem that I had to deal with years ago;
that is an odd problem multi-scale sampling resolutions or errors.  

Years ago I consulted for and wrote some prototype code for a taxonomic
database.  On of the problems that I had to wrap my head around was the
problem of describing time that a plant or animal died and became
interred into some sediment.  Let's say that we know that this event
took place 65,000,000 years ago (+5,000,000,-1,000,000). Because of
various morphological characteristics it happened in what we would call
April (+/- a month)... 

While this is only a somewhat contrived example and likely to be of
little concern to most, the issue of dealing with multiple time sources
with different known (or suspected) accuracy do exist.  I might be nice
if there were some mechanism to store or report sampling accuracy.

  EBo --