Posted by
timothy
on from the seconds-all-taste-the-same dept.
ygslash writes "The IERS has announced today that, after seven years, there will once again be a leap second this year. On December 31, 2005, the time 12:59 will last for 61 seconds."
These guys must not be real nerds
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
or else they would have made it last 69 seconds
Re:These guys must not be real nerds
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LordEd
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· Score: 1
Um, you mean 42, right?
Re:These guys must not be real nerds
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Everleet
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· Score: 2, Funny
Each minute that is a multiple of 3 shall last 42 seconds, and each minute that is not shall last 69 seconds. It's the perfect system.
-- It's tragic. Laugh.
Re:These guys must not be real nerds
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VernonNemitz
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The thing that bothers me is, when that big quake in Indonesia went off last year and caused that big tsunami, they talked about how the Earth's rotation SPEEDED UP. If it has already slowed down again in only one year, such that a leap second is needed, then that implies some other place has been bulging and may be about to give way. So, any Slashdotters who can pass this inference on to the geology folks, please do so pronto! Thanks!
Re:These guys must not be real nerds
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If I remember the articles correctly, the speedup due to the tsunami earthquake was so infintesimal that it would never have caused us to lose even a fraction of a second. It's just the media trying to sensationalize things to get a good story.
Re:These guys must not be real nerds
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LordEd
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· Score: 1
hm... 59 / 3 = 19 divisible by 3
so 41 not divisible by 3
Should we really bother?
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Lord+Bitman
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· Score: 1
you really think we'll still be using this system of time when leap seconds add up to a significant amount?
-- -- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Re:Should we really bother?
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B.D.Mills
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· Score: 5, Interesting
It depends on your definition of "significant".
I have calculated[1] that in 1000 years a leap second will be required about every two months. It's likely that at that time we would still be using time standards similar to those in use now.
On the other hand, in 1 million years, about 15 leap seconds will be required each day. Therefore, at some point timekeeping must necessarily divide the day into units that are not an integral number of seconds. We would have a situation where the record for the 100 metres dash is expressed in seconds, but the length of the second used for dividing up the day is not the same length. Such "stretched time" has already been used for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars.
[1] A common formula for approximating the evolution of delta-T over time is 31 * Cy^2, where Cy is expressed in centuries.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Re:Should we really bother?
by
Unordained
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Not so many centuries ago, the concept of 'hour' was flexible, depending on the season. 12 day hours, 12 night hours, regardless of the ratio between them. Back to the old?
Re:Should we really bother?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
well the meter is defined as never 'changing' only able to become more acurate. maybe we should have some kind of way like that to define measurements of time
Re:Should we really bother?
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Lord+Bitman
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· Score: 1
I expect that as the concept of the "year" becomes more and more antiquated and less and less meaningful, we will begin to simply count some arbitrary number and due without the likening to arbitrary phenomena.
You dont think things will change in 1000 years? It's hard to keep things the same for 10. And that will just get more tedious once we abandon the "year", of course.;)
-- -- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Re:Should we really bother?
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spectral
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· Score: 1
Impossible. Time is one of the fundamental units. You need an accurate second to be able to measure your meter.
Re:Should we really bother?
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antispam_ben
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I have calculated[1] that in 1000 years a leap second will be required about every two months. It's likely that at that time we would still be using time standards similar to those in use now.
Simple solution, change the 60 Hz power line frequency to 59.9999885922 Hz, causing power-line synchronous clocks to slow down to match the daily rotation of the Earth (as referenced to the Sun).
On the other hand, in 1 million years, about 15 leap seconds will be required each day.
Simple solution, change the 59.9999885922 Hz power line frequency to 59.9895833333 Hz, causing power-line synchronous clocks to slow down to match the daily rotation of the Earth (as referenced to the Sun).
Therefore, at some point timekeeping must necessarily divide the day into units that are not an integral number of seconds.
More seriously, I can see where all watches (except the old-fashioned mechanical ones rich people have) will be synchronized to whichever standard the wearer specifies, receiving and converting from an absolote standard such as WWVB as "atomic clocks" do now. Most people will use the daily rotation of the Earth (as referenced to the Sun) standard, but perhaps the stopwatch function can use the "historically established" value for the duration of a second.
Having a watch that keeps several times with good accuracy and converts between them is not a problem now. There are several easily available low-power microcontrollers that will give reasonable battery life. To quote bad sci-fi, "We have the technology."
-- Tag lost or not installed.
Re:Should we really bother?
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waterbear
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· Score: 1
A common formula for approximating the evolution of delta-T over time is 31 * Cy^2, where Cy is expressed in centuries.
The formulae are to some extent empirical as well as being approximations. The evolution of delta-t is also extremely 'noisy', and is far from a good fit with any of the formulae.
For the last few years it's been at around 64 seconds (see data in here), which comes to about 3 or 4 seconds less for the present time than some recent formulae were predicting even only a few years ago, and last time I checked nobody had a really good explanation. So it's a bit optimistic to extrapolate over 1000 years!
-wb-
Re:Should we really bother?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
15 leap seconds times 365 days = 91 minutes
They'll just adjust the placement of the leap year, which is much simpler than doing constant leap second adjustments.
Re:Should we really bother?
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antispam_ben
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· Score: 1
15 leap seconds times 365 days = 91 minutes
They'll just adjust the placement of the leap year, which is much simpler than doing constant leap second adjustments.
Dunno if that's an attempt to get a funny mod or what, but I'll take it seriously.
There's only one slight problem with this, noontime as the clock will happen an hour and a half earlier in the day every year, until after eight years noon occurs in the middle of the night. After another eight years of this silliness, you can add an extra Leap Day to compensate.
Leap seconds adjust for the speed of rotation of the Earth, where Leap Year/Day adjusts for the Earth's orbital period around the Sun not being an integral multiple of its daily rotation.
-- Tag lost or not installed.
Re:Should we really bother?
by
SpaceLifeForm
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· Score: 1
Adjusting the AC Frequency is not a viable option.
The Hertz value already fluctuates with load.
It's very close to the engineered value (50 or 60) but is constantly fluctuating.
That is why AC powered clocks that use the HZ to
drive them tend to need adjustment over time.
-- You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Re:Should we really bother?
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B.D.Mills
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· Score: 1
It's a bit optimistic to extrapolate over 1000 years!
This is why I made sure to state that the formula was an approximation.
Although it is unlikely that such formulae are going to be accurate 1 million years form now, it does not detract from the point that I raise, namely that our current definition of 86400 seconds to the day and 1 second = 9192631770 cesium transitions cannot both last indefinitely.
Will there be six leap seconds in 3000? Unlikely. But suppose you owned a very accurate wrist watch and were transported into the year 3000, in the style of Futurama. Your wrist watch will still keep good time, gaining maybe six seconds over the course of a year (the hypothetical leap seconds). Your watch doesn't keep quite as good time anymore, but being six seconds early is not going to affect you significantly. You won't arrive too early for the maglev, or your appointment with your temporal displacement counsellor.
On the other hand, a similar displacement a million years into the future will be a great deal more noticeable. Your watch now gains somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds per day because the mean solar day has stretched to between 86410 and 86420 seconds. Over the course of a month your watch would gain maybe seven or eight minutes, and over the course of a year your once-accurate timepiece now gains an hour and a half. That's a lot.
While these extrapolations are unlikely to be accurate for the reasons you state, the point remains the same - at some point the second as derived from the cesium standard must diverge from the second as derived from the rotation of the earth. It already does this but not noticeably so. However, there will come a time when new time standards must be adopted.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Re:Should we really bother?
by
Retric
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· Score: 1
In a million years people might start adjusting the orbital speed of the earth to fix this. Or they might redefine the second to be a few more cesium transitions.
Personally I think it's a little far off to guess what we are going to be doing.
Re:Should we really bother?
by
dublin
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· Score: 1
I have calculated[1] that in 1000 years a leap second will be required about every two months. It's likely that at that time we would still be using time standards similar to those in use now.
You're off by a bit, and are making some invalid assumptions to start with.
Steve Allen of the Lick Observatory has a great paper explaining the the fundamental clock problem and also exploring effects and impacts on society. It's really quite fascinating, and considerably more complex than most people imagine. I've read papers on the other side, but agree with Allen that nailing the world's time to TI (atomic time) breaks what has never been broken before in all human history, and that letting a bunch of bureaucrats push this through will have serious global consequences.
This is a real problem, and one that will have huge consequences if we let the "science weenies" redefine clock time. As the article points out, the fundamental problem is that "what time is it?" is a qusetion that has two different answers, depending on what you're trying to do. The vast majority of the time, that question means "What time of day is it?" (which is why replacing UT1 with TI/TAI is unwise), but other times (especially to scientists) it means "what interval in invariant time units (seconds, we hope) has passed since I last looked at the clock?" Of course, seconds haven't always been of the same length, or even, for that matter, of fixed length: as recently as 1971, the world's master clocks used "rubber seconds" instead of leap seconds to keep clocks properly in sync with the real world. (This is mostly why Unix/Posix clocks don't know about leap seconds: because leap seconds were only a proposal until a year after teh epoch.)
There is a fundamental incompatibility between time-of-day and time intervals. Keeping clocks aligned is extrraordinarily difficult, and breaking the lock between the clocks and "earth time" has hideously expensive and insidiously far-reaching consequences. (Not least of all to navigation, which is already complex enough, but becomes even more difficult if you let the day slip around the planet. If you don't understand celestial navigation and how determining longitude is *exactly* the same thing as having a clock that is rigorously synchronized to the sun, then spend a while reading Bowditch.)
-- "The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last./ post
Star Trek has it figured out.
by
Goalie_Ca
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· Score: 3, Funny
Stardates
The only problem is that no one knows how its supposed to work.
--
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Re:Star Trek has it figured out.
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toddbu
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The only problem is that no one knows how its supposed to work.
They work much like warp speed - start out low and end high. The higher the epsiode number, the higher the range. I think that it's derived from fishing, where "the big one that got away" gets bigger each time the story is told.
-- If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
-- All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
Re:Shouldn't that be...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
i don't understand what message your post is supposed to convey. 1:00 is still the next day so if it's the last second on the last day it should be 11:59 or 23:49
I don't care. I have an atomic watch that will automatically adjust. It is solar powered too, so I never have to worry about the bateries running down either. I love my watch.
Re:I have an atomic watch!
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interweb
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· Score: 2, Funny
What if the Sun goes out? How will you keep time?
Re:I have an atomic watch!
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iggymanz
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· Score: 2, Informative
hah, my sun dial is also solar powered but doesn't need a radio reference.
Re:I have an atomic watch!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Mine works at night though.:)
Re:I have an atomic watch!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1
If the sun goes out, will you care?
Re:I have an atomic watch!
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flawedgeek
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· Score: 1
What good is a solar powered watch if you never go outside? After all, this is/.
-- My other Sig is.40 caliber.
Re:I have an atomic watch!
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ksemlerK
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· Score: 1
3 hrs flourecent light = 1 hour sunlight. The watch will recharge indoors if nessecary. Plus, I work in the service industry. I am outside about 5 hours a day, every day during work hours.
Re:I have an atomic watch!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I don't care. I have an atomic watch that will automatically adjust. It is solar powered too, so I never have to worry about the bateries running down either. I love my watch.
You must be really strong. I didnt know the HP 5071A was solar powered though.:-)
Re:I have an atomic watch!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Re:I have an atomic watch!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If the sun goes out, will you care?
That's why it was a joke there, Einstein.
Re:I have an atomic watch!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Star positions, my friend. Memorize them and you'll always know what time it is.
Re:I have an atomic watch!
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iggymanz
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· Score: 1
how come God doesn't rotate them 30 degree for Daylight Savings Time, after all we're His Nation and we made it The Law, dammit!!!!!
Its always bugged me how...
by
IronMagnus
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Its always bugged me how in a leap year, we have an extra day... but a leap second is an entire extra second... if the terminology were consistent, that would mean a leap yer would equal one extra year.. or that a leap second was some fraction of a second longer than a normal one.
Re:Its always bugged me how...
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iggymanz
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· Score: 1
you'll be delighted to know that february 29 is called a "leap day".
Re:Its always bugged me how...
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Meshach
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· Score: 1
-- "Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
Re:Its always bugged me how...
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Atzanteol
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· Score: 1
But the extra day added to a "leap year" is called "leap day."
-- "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Re:Its always bugged me how...
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IronMagnus
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· Score: 1
Yes, but by that logic, a leap anything added to a year should make that a leap year.. so is this a leap year because we are adding an extra second as other years are leap years because we add a day to it?
Re:Its always bugged me how...
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Atzanteol
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· Score: 1
Sure, why not? It would keep with convention. It would probably confuse those who don't know about leap seconds though.
-- "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Re:Its always bugged me how...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
But the extra day added to a "leap year" is called "leap day."
Huh? I always called it February 29th.
Re:Its always bugged me how...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Propagates over to grandparent unit. Leap day -> month -> leap year. (weeks are in a different namespace) Leap second -> minute -> leap hour. So the last hour of 2005 will be a leap hour.
Re:Its always bugged me how...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Leap year refers to the year that a leap day occurs in (i.e. 2004 was a leap year).
"To authorities responsible for the measurement and distribution of time..." How do I make an official complaint with these time-distributing authorities for all the times I've been blamed for being late? Everyone always thought it was my fault for running out of time--but nope, turns out there are "authorities" in charge of all that. Are they any relation to the Tooth Fairy?
Two questions
by
roystgnr
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Isn't this sort of thing calculable farther in advance? There shouldn't be a whole lot of angular momentum being added or subtracted from the Earth's rotation.
Do I need a new glibc? Or any other POSIX library, for that matter? If this is a new announcement then presumably every implementation of mktime(), localtime(), gmtime(), etc. needs to be updated.
Re:Two questions
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lachlan76
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually you'd just set the NTP server you're syncing with one second ahead. I don't think that a once-every-seven-year event is going to be worthy of kernel changes, especially since your time is probably off by more than one second as it is.
Re:Two questions
by
Mudd+Guy
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· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, it's not calculable farther in advance. The Earth's rotation is inconsistent enough that leap seconds are sometimes needed, but the need can't be predicted more than about a year in advance [1]. In other words, there is noise in the Earth's rotation period of about 1 second per year. Atomic clocks are a lot better than this (good to ~50 ns per year [2]!!!), so it's pretty easy to detect the problem.
According to a link I just read, POSIX doesn't handle leap seconds. So yes, if you use NTP, like someone else suggested, your time will be correct, but any measurements of time crossing leap seconds won't.
The correct solution in my opinion would be to store leap seconds along with the timezone information. That's really what they are. Unix time could be stored in TAI instead of UTC, and thus subtracting two times from each other would still give the correct result.
Whenever a leap second was announced you'd have to download a new timezone file, and if you didn't download the file in time your displayed time would be off by a second. Alternatively, if you synced using NTP, which is in UTC, and you didn't update your timezone file, then your computer would incorrectly slow down the clock by one second. Once you installed the timezone file, and resynced with NTP, this would be corrected.
Eventually NTP should probably be switched over to TAI. I see a proposal for this in a mailing list in January 2004. Would have been nice to do it before the leap second, but that's probably too soon to expect many people to change at this point.
Re:Two questions
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Insightful? You're just stupid.
You don't rewrite the world's software for such a simple thing that is UPDATED WHENEVER YOU SYNC WITH NIST.
Actually you'd just set the NTP server you're syncing with one second ahead.
That simple solution will cause one of two problems: either your time will be off by one second, or the calculation of the number of seconds between two events crossing the leap second will be off by one second.
I don't think that a once-every-seven-year event is going to be worthy of kernel changes, especially since your time is probably off by more than one second as it is.
If you're regularly using NTPD your time is probably not off by more than one second, and if you've got a GPS receiver it almost certainly isn't. But I agree with you that a kernel change isn't necessary, in fact, the kernel shouldn't be involved with terrestial time at all.
From what I understand, at least some standard libraries do need to be changed because they do not correctly measure time intervals crossing leap second boundaries. But once that is resolved, making sure that your calculations and time displays are correct should be a simple matter of downloading a file containing all the historical leap seconds.
Well, regarding the second point, think of this as a reminder of why you should NEVER EVER store future time and date values as offsets from an epoch time/date, if being one second off is bad for your application.
-- GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
If you're regularly using NTPD your time is probably not off by more than one second, and if you've got a GPS receiver it almost certainly isn't. But I agree with you that a kernel change isn't necessary, in fact, the kernel shouldn't be involved with terrestial time at all.
PC hardware sucks, or just mine. I sync ntpd every 4 hours on my workstation which is on all the time, consistantly it needs to adjust it by "0.31xxx" seconds. And that's just for four hours, imagine running it only once per day or once per week or something.
Sounds like a software issue, not a hardware one. If your clock consistently needs to be adjusted by 0.31xxx seconds, then ntpd should be automatically adjusting by 0.31 seconds every 4 hours. ntpd will do this if it is run in daemon mode.
Re:Two questions
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
If there is noise in the Earth's rotation period of about 1 second per year, then this means that one shouldn't try to sync clocks with the Earth to within 1 sec! What's next, leap milliseconds twice a day?
Having to code a long list of leap seconds in software libraries is NOT FUN. 99.9% of people don't care if solar noon is off by 1 sec, and the 0.1% of people who care would rather compensate for the drift themselves and NOT have leap seconds which complicates calculations.
If the people at IERS didn't feel all warm and fuzzy when they unleach their leap seconds onto the civilian world, we'd have a better tradeoff. The best would probably be leap minutes (once a century or so).
Off by one error
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Taral
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Oh, joy. Everyone'll be off a second on the damn New Year's count... again!
-- Taral
WARN_(accel)("msg null; should hang here to be win compatible\n");
-- WINE source code
Re:Off by one error
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anthony_dipierro
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Seriously, you'd think they'd pick a less conspicuous second to make the switch. Instead they picked the one second of the year that people notice more than any other. At least it'll only affect the New Year's count for the Brits. Here in the US we won't even be heading to the party yet.
Re:Off by one error
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
you'd think they'd pick a less conspicuous second to make the switch.
According to the summary it's just before 1 in the afternoon. The summary is wrong, of course, but that's not exactly shocking.
A standardized second.
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TapeCutter
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· Score: 2, Funny
The same uber-nerds who defined the meter have also defined the second.
Lifted from wikipedia - The second is one of seven SI base units. It is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom at zero kelvins.
Now that we have a definition perhaps someone could tell us what it means.:)
-- And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Re:A standardized second.
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J'raxis
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· Score: 2, Informative
All it means is that someone looked at the conventional length of a second (1/86400 of a day) and found a natural phenomena that was really, really, really, really, really close, and unlike the length of a day, won't change over time.
As another example, take the metre. You can see how the definition of the metre became more and more precise here. I don't see it mentioned there, but the original "meaningful" definition of the metre, if extremely imprecise, is based on water: 1 ml of water = 1 gm in mass = 1 cm on each side when formed intoa cube.
The second is one of seven SI base units. It is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom at zero kelvins.
The definition is made in terms of the most accurate way we have of measuring it - with the atomic clock. There's a description of how they work here.
In the future the definition may change - there are developments to produce "optical clocks" which are more accurate even than atomic clocks. Read about them here or here (subscription required). Of course, any new definition will be chosen to be compatible with the previous definitions, to within the accuracy afforded by those definitions.
Re:A standardized second.
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B.D.Mills
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· Score: 1
That's incorrect. A metre was once defined as one ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and the north pole. The polar circumference was chosen because a polar circumference passes through Paris.
The mass definition was thus based on the length of the metre, not the other way around.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Ah. I always thought that the water relationship was the first "conventional" definition -- in the same way as units like inches and cubits have positively banal original definitions (inch = length of three barley corns laid end to end, or the length of a thumb; cubit = length of the forearm), and that they only switched to a complex definition to ensure precision (and over time, progressively more complex -- and in human terms, meaningless -- definitions in order to increase precision).
IIRC, time is a key element of GPS accuracy. Even if updates come from atomic clocks, a human will have to key in a correction to a significant number of servers. Maybe Murphy and Chicken Little will show up for our New Years party.
The other problem is that if starship travel at warp speeds, you run into problems with relativity, unless everyone uses one central clock. And if warp speed is >= (c) speed of light, then you're completely screwed.
Actually, and it's been a long time for me here, but I think Warp 1 = speed of light and the other warps went up from that exponentially. So warp 9.9 wasn't 9.9 times faster than the speed of light. It was many many many times greater than that...which is how they were able to zip around from one end of the quadrant to the other in a manner of days.
And of course, they explained away relativity effects because they were in a "warp bubble" when at warp speed...that is if they weren't trapped on the Holodeck or sent back in time yet again.
--
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Note: Under the old system (used in the Original Series,) devised by Zephram Cochrane, the speed at any warp factor was given as: Ship's Velocity diveded by C is equal to the Warp Factor Cubed.
Therefore, in the Original Series, a Warp Factor of 3 was 27 times the speed of light, while a Warp Factor of 14 ws 2744 times the speed of light, or between Warp 9.6 and 9.9. I do not have the forumala for determining Warp Factors for the system, nor for the new system above 9. (They are the same formula, though above 9 factors which do not vary enough at lower speeds to affect the calculation are actually important.
Also, the new Warp Factor system used in Next Generation Onward does not indicate an Absolute Speed -- it actually indicates the ammount of stress given on a ship in any given situation. The speeds in the parent post are in a 'normal' area of empty space. However, inside certain anomalous areas, (Such as the Briar Patch, from the Ninth Movie) the speed at any given Warp Factor is different (roughly half for the Briar Patch.)
--
Edward@Tomato -/home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
I think warp 10 can be reached by Douglas Adams' improbability drive. Or some other device that can be everywhere at the same time... I can't remember exactly, but it seems i can remember reading a story about something like this.
-- I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
Yes, the nice thing about the Improbability Drive is that the ship occupies all points in space at the same time, and then appears in the place you want to be.
Generally speaking, that is.
--
Edward@Tomato -/home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Re:Relativity
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You're thinking of the Voyager episode Threshold; they went into great detail about how a ship at Warp 10 was everywhere in the universe at once.
Re:How will GPS be affected?
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Detritus
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· Score: 1
GPS uses it's own time scale, which has a fixed offset to TAI (TAI - 19 seconds). There are no leap seconds in the GPS time scale.
The last time I listened to WWV (the shortwave broadcast of NIST time), the signal said we were -0.6s ahead of time (ahead of the Earth's rotation). My thinking is that if we put in a leapsecond now, then we'd be -1.6s ahead - am I missing the point of the time broadcast code, or is this a hoax?
Re:I thought we were behind
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
if we put in a leapsecond now, then we'd be -1.6s ahead
The extra second will back it up. If we were behind then we'd cut out a second to catch up.
Microsoft has $33.8 billion in short term investments. Since interest payments are calculated by the day, and not the second, at an interest rate of 3% Microsoft will lose $1929 in interest due to this leap second.
12:59 on Dec. 31st is the only time in the whole year that people are paying attention to the seconds. Why not choose some other time when it's not going to screw up my countdown?
-- or else!
Re:How will GPS be affected?
by
qualico
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· Score: 1
Interesting. So we have "time in a bottle", so to speak.
Lets look at how time has progressed:
CT based on UTC by the ICWM at the 10th GCWM ES based on NTS ratified at the 11th, GCWM SI equals ES from USNO and NPL discovery as ratified at the 13th GCWM UT1 monitored by SRSPEOP of the IERS, thus we get LS adjustments according to CCIR.
Now we get TAI by BIPM expressed as UTC+dAT GPS is sychronized to UTC but not adjusted with LSs
OK, hold onto your pants... Until 1960, UT independant of AE. UT then replaced by ET. ET then replaced by TDT and TDB TDT renamed TT along with TCG and TCB. TT is obtained from the relation TT = UTC + dAT + 32.184s for a known UTC and # of LS
Holy Crap! I'm thinking that we should just stop time so we can save on acronyms and slow the rate of confusion created by adjustments and the constant addition of new time measuring standards.
What are they going to do when they get to other planets? Especially if there is some spacial anomaly along the way. Guess they'll forget Earth time alogether.
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What AM I going to do with all that extra time?
or else they would have made it last 69 seconds
you really think we'll still be using this system of time when leap seconds add up to a significant amount?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Stardates
The only problem is that no one knows how its supposed to work.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Shouldn't the time be 12:01? If the first second of 1/1/06 is going to be doubled, like TFA says...
"Martha Stewart can lick my Scrotum......do i have a scrotum?" -- Sharon Osbourne
I've always wanted a timeslip (i.e. from the Mars Trilogy)
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
I don't care. I have an atomic watch that will automatically adjust. It is solar powered too, so I never have to worry about the bateries running down either. I love my watch.
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Its always bugged me how in a leap year, we have an extra day... but a leap second is an entire extra second... if the terminology were consistent, that would mean a leap yer would equal one extra year.. or that a leap second was some fraction of a second longer than a normal one.
From the IERS website:
Welcome to the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service
Will they change my oil and check my brakes, too?
10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1...0...
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
"To authorities responsible for the measurement and distribution of time..." How do I make an official complaint with these time-distributing authorities for all the times I've been blamed for being late? Everyone always thought it was my fault for running out of time--but nope, turns out there are "authorities" in charge of all that. Are they any relation to the Tooth Fairy?
Isn't this sort of thing calculable farther in advance? There shouldn't be a whole lot of angular momentum being added or subtracted from the Earth's rotation.
Do I need a new glibc? Or any other POSIX library, for that matter? If this is a new announcement then presumably every implementation of mktime(), localtime(), gmtime(), etc. needs to be updated.
Oh, joy. Everyone'll be off a second on the damn New Year's count... again!
Taral
WARN_(accel)("msg null; should hang here to be win compatible\n");
-- WINE source code
This year's been bad enough for me, now it seems like it's going to drag on forever!
Actually, if they RTFA it's 11:59 PM... just wanted to clarify.
http://ablegray.com
I just wanted to be the first to mention this site, someone wanted to view the previous leap second, and that became an obsession.
Okay, here's a clickable link:
http://leapsecond.com/
An obsession in another are of time is this Y10K Compliant clock:
http://longnow.org/
Tag lost or not installed.
The same uber-nerds who defined the meter have also defined the second.
:)
Lifted from wikipedia - The second is one of seven SI base units. It is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom at zero kelvins.
Now that we have a definition perhaps someone could tell us what it means.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
to the C standard! Yay!
You forgot to take into account "Double Leap Seconds"
/.
I remeber reading about some Unix library or whatnot (ctime or something) that could handle them... musta been a slow news day on
I have freaks! I did something right...
IIRC, time is a key element of GPS accuracy.
Even if updates come from atomic clocks, a human will have to key in a correction to a significant number of servers.
Maybe Murphy and Chicken Little will show up for our New Years party.
Why can't 12:58 be 61 seconds long? Or perhaps shorten :57 by 10 seconds and just make :58 71 seconds long!
The other problem is that if starship travel at warp speeds, you run into problems with relativity, unless everyone uses one central clock. And if warp speed is >= (c) speed of light, then you're completely screwed.
GPS uses it's own time scale, which has a fixed offset to TAI (TAI - 19 seconds). There are no leap seconds in the GPS time scale.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I think, I wouldn't notice even a leap hour ^^;;
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
The last time I listened to WWV (the shortwave broadcast of NIST time), the signal said we were -0.6s ahead of time (ahead of the Earth's rotation). My thinking is that if we put in a leapsecond now, then we'd be -1.6s ahead - am I missing the point of the time broadcast code, or is this a hoax?
Microsoft has $33.8 billion in short term investments. Since interest payments are calculated by the day, and not the second, at an interest rate of 3% Microsoft will lose $1929 in interest due to this leap second.
12:59 on Dec. 31st is the only time in the whole year that people are paying attention to the seconds. Why not choose some other time when it's not going to screw up my countdown?
or else!
Interesting.
So we have "time in a bottle", so to speak.
Lets look at how time has progressed:
CT based on UTC by the ICWM at the 10th GCWM
ES based on NTS ratified at the 11th, GCWM
SI equals ES from USNO and NPL discovery as ratified at the 13th GCWM
UT1 monitored by SRSPEOP of the IERS, thus we get LS adjustments according to CCIR.
Now we get TAI by BIPM expressed as UTC+dAT
GPS is sychronized to UTC but not adjusted with LSs
OK, hold onto your pants...
Until 1960, UT independant of AE.
UT then replaced by ET.
ET then replaced by TDT and TDB
TDT renamed TT along with TCG and TCB.
TT is obtained from the relation TT = UTC + dAT + 32.184s for a known UTC and # of LS
Holy Crap!
I'm thinking that we should just stop time so we can save on acronyms and slow the rate of confusion created by adjustments and the constant addition of new time measuring standards.
What are they going to do when they get to other planets?
Especially if there is some spacial anomaly along the way.
Guess they'll forget Earth time alogether.
Shouldn't the summary read 11:59pm aka 23:59?
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.