tzdb was the subject of an academic study published at the most recent annual meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology: Hauser E. UNIX time, UTC, and datetime: Jussivity, prolepsis, and incorrigibility in modern timekeeping. Proc ASIS&T. 2018;55(1):161-70. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.2018.14505501018 For those of us not into the lingo, "jussivity" refers to how much a word or concept commands or exhorts us, and is related to the jussive mood of verbs in some languages. For example in the Latin phrase "doceas iter" ("teach the way") in the Aeneid, the mood of "doceas" means that people ought to teach the way. "Prolepsis" refers to foreshadowing, as in a proleptic calendar that is projected backward into the past or projected into the future. "Incorrigibility" refers to the property of a belief that a person cannot give up; here, the idea is that tzdb provides its own grounds for truth and its users can't (and don't want to) correct tzdb. As you can probably tell from my having to explain the words in the title, the tz mailing list was not the intended audience of this paper. Still, it can be amusing to see how outsiders see us.