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U.S. Moves to Kill Leap Seconds
blacklite001 writes "Not content with merely extending Daylight Savings Time, the U.S. government now also proposes to eliminate leap seconds, according to a Wall Street Journal story. Their proposal, 'made secretly to a United Nations body,' includes adding 'a "leap hour" every 500 to 600 years.'
Hey, anyone remember the last bunch of people to mess with the calendar?"
but it seems to be working perfectly fine as it is, why fuck with it?
http://leapsecond.com/ -- This guy should complain. They're taking all the fun out of his clock collection!
I say the government should move to Internet time and leave the big boy alone. Looks like that already does what it wants...
And what about all those people with birthdays on February 29th? Guess they'll only age once every 500 years
like this actually helps to fix an already-broken calendar. There are many alternatives but legislators like to pull these stupid stunts to avoid actual real decisions.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
... 'cause we've got the bomb!
Disclaimer: This refering to a quote, don't 'troll' me because you don't know Denis Leary.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Hey, anyone remember the last bunch of people to mess with the calendar?"
/and sad
Heh. OK that's funny. And true.
El riesgo vive siempre!
Wouldn't a leap minute every couple of generations be better than being close to an hour off base for a hundred years or so?
So while there may be plenty of brits that think this is a silly idea (me included) it's got bog all to do with GMT.
HTH
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Sometimes, with our very limited 80 year lifespans, we start to think that everything that we do now is the absolutely most important thing ever, and we make decisions based on that rather than looking to history for a sense of scale. 500 years ago, people weren't reading, they weren't really doing much of anything productive. It wasn't until the Renaissance that things really started humming.
So 500 years from now, with a whole hour of time slip, what will they think of how we just decided to change the manner in which we adjust time?
In China, there is only one timezone, but it works terribly since half the country wakes up in the dark and the other half wakes up in bright sunlight. They have adapted to this by "unofficially" setting work hours according to the longitudinal timezone rather than the government-mandated timezone. I wonder if there were a huge leap second buildup whether people would just start waking up according to the absolute time rather than the political time.
I think it's a bad idea, and I can't think of the benefits. But I guess I'm not a scientist, so I wouldn't understand those issues.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Hey, anyone remember the last bunch of people to mess with the calendar?
I may not be 100% correct on this, but I'm sure there are more recent examples of the 'last' bunch of people messing with the calender? What about Robespierre during the Reign of Terror for the French Revolution.
I don't see anywhere in the U.S. Constitution that the government has been given authority over time. I guess strict constructionism applies only to judges and not the government. Bummer... There's never a Time Lord when you need one.
We Americans are so lazy that now we cannot take the effort to change our clocks a mere 2 times a year. And why do we have a 24 hour day anyways. Instead we could just have a 23 and whatever hour day and not ever have to change our clocks.
Go to the w3.org and put Slashdot.org through the validator.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
This bit is neat:
"The U.S. effort to abolish leap seconds is also firmly opposed by Britain, which would further lose status as the center of time. From 1884 to 1961, the world set its official clocks to Greenwich Mean Time, based on the actual rise and set of the stars as seen from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, just outside London."
I had no idea there was still a physical basis for this. I assumed there was a master atomic clock.
I can see why the USA would do this: they move around the holidays to fit the work week (e.g. Monday or Friday, whichever's closest). Try doing that with Corpus Christi in Continental Europe: it would be considered totally absurd.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
http://www.mail-archive.com/leapsecs@rom.usno.nav
Brief excerpt:
When does the next 500 year period end?
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
And just how much safer is an hour jump every 500-600 years than a second jump every couple of years? Instead of Y2K we'll have YhourK a few hundred years from now. Since nobody will be expecting it there will be chaos.
I say we adjust the planet's rotation and orbit so we have perfect intervals.
Will scientists then have to develop their own calendar that is actually accurate then? That would be strange. I'm all for the elmination of DST anyhow, but Leap seconds/hours/days are just a fact of the universe when you measure time by the rotation of an object that is slowing down ever so slowly.
...go back to the Imperial system of measures too? Nah, bless you Americans with your lovely paper size known as Letter (and every wierd piece of software that insists on using it).
Will Windows XP tell me to send an error report to Microsoft because the clock died?
Has Netcraft confirmed this as of yet?
The big, bad US goverment following the lead of the terrorist Bush, wishes to subvert the world by eliminating leap seconds. Give me a break! Remove the tinfoil hat ... I realize how hard that is for most of the slashbot liberal groupthink crowd but seriously, it's time to get over it. The only thing being proposed is to extend daylight savings time. It would take an act of Congress to eliminate leap seconds and any bill being proposed by Congress can be read online. Something like this would NEVER pass both the House and the Senate and be signed by Bush ... as much as you hate him, it just wouldn't happen. Abortion on demand has a better shot at becoming law than anything like this, and anyone who knows anything about the current political climate in Washington knows how likely that is to happen. Just bide your time until he's out of office and then convince as many of your buddies as you can to vote for a Democrat is 2008. I'm getting sick and fucking tired of your conspiricy theories about Bush and co trying to take over the world.
The astronomers are not convinced. "If your navigation system causes two planes to crash because of a one-second error, you have worse problems than leap seconds," said Steve Allen, a University of California astronomer who maintains a Web site about leap seconds.
That's so right.
Leap seconds and leap days aren't related. Leap days are related to the need to make a year's length expressible in integral number of days by a sort of infinite series approximation. Unless the length of a year were an actual integral number of days, leap days would be needed even if there was no "slowing" ever. By contrast, leap seconds are added to accomodate "slowing" and are not an artifact of the original relation. The use of the term "leap" for both of these is probably what attracts politicians to "leap" to the rescue. Perhaps they should take a second to reconsider...
... arrogant. I'm pretty sure that, say, somewhere around 2027, we're going to have a lot of discussion about our present representation of time and whether it's the right one...
I actually agree that leap seconds are a bit of a mess, and I wouldn't mind seeing a better solution. But the one proposed sounds a bit bizarre. Surely the real problem is an artifact of the infancy of computer systems and the ad hoc, non-general solutions to time representation we've been using due to very small address spaces that are rapidly falling by the wayside. Why not just delay the issuing of them for a couple of decades until we can think harder about the problem. Pretending that any law passed now is going to stand unused for hundreds of years before it has any effect seems a little
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
500 years ago, people weren't reading, they weren't really doing much of anything productive. It wasn't until the Renaissance that things really started humming.
May I suggest you learn some history before you argue that people should learn from it? 500 years ago, the so-called Renaissance had already been going on for about 100 years in most of Europe. Printing was 50 years old, and the mass-production of books had begun in earnest. If "people weren't reading", who the hell was buying them all, do you think? Come to that, if "people weren't really doing much of anything productive", where the hell do you think printing came from? Did Gutenberg's press fall fully-formed from the sky or something?
Oh, and the "renaissance" is over-rated. The middle ages were the big days when important things were invented - things like representative democracy that you might just have heard of?
yea this is great, FINALLY i get to post ahead of all you .......... something. hah.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolutionary_ Calendar
It was tried again and again to change the calendar.
Mr. Gregory XIII was only the last one who did it successfully.
Along with this proposal, it would also be a good idea to switch our time-keeping to metric units, just like the Geek Coucil in "The Simpsons" did. Well, ya know, some programmers got families to feed. And I've been dreaming of owning a boat for a while now...
The article talks about lots of problems that leap seconds cause with software.
The problems don't come from the complexity of the underlying problem of adding leap seconds, but rather because leap seconds are added so infrequently that the code to handle the leap seconds isn't well tested.
So the real question here (to me, at least) is this: what do the leap second problems tell us about how software is developed?
Are people not thinking about leap seconds when they write code? Or are they thinking about them, but not testing the leap second cases properly? What's going on?
And how does the emergence of really big collections of APIs affect this? I mean, if people use standard routines for calendar functions, and if people keep their tools up to date, shouldn't these problems be mitigated? Shouldn't we be able to have some hard core calendar geeks solve the problem once in the API, and carry the rest of us?
If that doesn't work, why not?
We can solve this particular problem by changing the calendar. But what if we couldn't, and we had to try to address it with engineering practices? How would we proceed?
When I navigate using a compass (yes, some of us still do) I need to know the difference between magnetic north and true north. This figure is either subtracted or added to my compass bearing so that I get to my destination.
All the astronomers need to do is know the difference between UTC and the true time then either add or subtract it. I'm sure that this could be done within the software that manages the positioning of the telescope.
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
The problem seems to be in adding a leap second every now and then, because computers they don't like it. "Well, what the hell, earth's movement for us Americans is not that important after all". Now that's what I call stupidity. Just deal with damn leap seconds. Could deal with Y2K, can deal with this.
Wasn't it Gregor (on the same wikipedia link) who was the last to mess with the calendar? Essentially, they moved back several days because leap days weren't correctly accounted for prior to then.
So, it's okay to play with daylight savings time but this leap second is a pain and needs to go?
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
From the article:
In Mr. Allen's view, absolutely not. "Time has basically always really meant what you measure when you put a stick in the ground and look at its shadow," he said.
I couldn't agree more.
The only sensible alternative is that we no longer keep time based on celestial mechanics, and we abolish leap days/year, daylight savings and the 365 day year too. Those are annoying to programmers like myself too.
Let's start counting in Stardates !
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
1. The Americans want to do X.
2. The Americans are bad.
3. Therefore, X is bad. QED.
To use the time-honoured method of finding out government secrets, you read about them in tomorrow's newspaper...
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
Hey, anyone remember the last bunch of people to mess with the calendar?
Withouth bothering to follow the link, I'd guess that'd be the Committee for Public Safety, yes?
What a nice, anti-terrorist sound that name has.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Why bother with hour system if we're changing the calendar/time in first place?
It would make much more sense to use more accurate measuring system like one that bases on half-life of isotopes.
Of course it would be rather inconvenient to say it's 12*10^6 past last decay of u-358, but it could be commonplace already to our great grandchildren.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Ok, so at some indeterminate time in the future* the US goverment proposes bestwoing upon the world an hours change in time.
Do they really expect people to plan for this event?
They will not, and will care even less than Y2K, as your clock will only be out by an hour.
Most people will have to shift their computer 1 time zone back/forward.
I'm pretty certain that there's
This is passing the buck to future generations.
It is better to have a working system now, with the occasional bug, than a spectacular IT crisis/fiasco in 500 year's time.
*I suspect we don't undersand the orbital mechanics or our solar system enough to decide now exactly when the leap hour will be inserted
In addition to the weirdness of having second 60 in a minute, you get that added headache that leap seconds are non-deterministic... you can't predict ahead of time when they will happen. Imagine you make a very precise schedule in advance (e.g. scheduled events on a spacecraft) and then a leap second is announced and everything is then off by a second. Now you have all of these tables out there that are wrong that you have to find and then correct... a major headache when your working with something where precision in time is important (e.g. a spacecraft moving at 8 km/s).
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Does anyone actually believe that governments 250 years in the future are going to put up time that is half an hour off? The US sucks.
So 500 years from now, with a whole hour of time slip, what will they think of how we just decided to change the manner in which we adjust time?
Oh, come on, our descendents can change it too! They have 500 years to find a better system.
I think it's a bad idea, and I can't think of the benefits.
Try looking at the benefits not compared to a fairy tale, but compared to our current leap second system.
But I guess I'm not a scientist, so I wouldn't understand those issues.
Agreed, but nothing prevents you from getting karma on slashdot.
Oh, and the "renaissance" is over-rated. The middle ages were the big days when important things were invented - things like representative democracy that you might just have heard of?
Yeah, I've heard of it. Haven't seen it in action yet.
Got Shadowrun? Awakened Worlds
"things were invented - things like representative democracy that you might just have heard of?"
No, thats Athens...
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
What they are proposing is like 'rounding to the nearest nickle'--no pennies.
Althought I like the nickle thing (pennies suck!), we need pennies to keep the books balanced. Let's not go chaning the way we do time, just for the odd penny every year.
Tripping over pennies when there are bigger things across the street -- sheesh!
It will make it harder to run telescopes, but also a number of navigational devices. The mention of the Glonass screwup is actually misleading - even if you abolish the leap second, you still have to have software in your satellites compensate for changes in Earth rotation rates - abolishing the leap second will not change that at all.
Probably the worst argument for getting rid of leap seconds is "they are rare anomalous events that cause potential danger for systems like ATC that are tightly coupled to time". That's misleading, though, because the proposal is actually to replace leap seconds with leap hours every 500 years. Which means that you replace a small, bi-annual anomaly with a gigantic one 500 years from now (on a scale larger than the Y2K bug, for sure.) Kicking the problem down the road so to speak - I'm not surprised it was originally suggested by a bunch of lazy programmers. Not to mention that that practice would mean that 400 years from now solar noon would be almost an hour away from actual noon (not that big a deal, of course, but annoying).
The argment for keeping the leap second is more than just tradition - it has practical value too.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Would be the French. Metric weeks and all that.
Haha.
iv never made it on time to a dentists apointment since
What programmers should be doing is using a calendar api to do calendar arithmetic. What next? Banning the business and religious calendars? Those are not very predictable either in some cases.
And does this mean the Romans had leap seconds where they adjusted their atomic clocks to keep in synch with the sun?
I know much of /. will be complaining about how this is about the Bush Administration attacking science in their quest to please big business, but in reality from a purely scientific stance this makes sense. The definition of a second hasn't been linked to the Earth's orbit since 1967, so why should we keep on pretending it still is?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Actually the last people to muck with the calendar were the Catholic Church, not the Ceasars. The current system of leap days and leap years was adopted by Pope Gregory (as in Gregorian Calendar) sometime in the renaissance. The Orthodox world clung to the Julian calendar leading to things like "Orthodox Easter" in late April/Early may and the "October Revolution" happening in what the rest of the world considered November.
In China, there is only one timezone, but it works terribly since half the country wakes up in the dark and the other half wakes up in bright sunlight. They have adapted to this by "unofficially" setting work hours according to the longitudinal timezone rather than the government-mandated timezone.
My feeling is that they should simply have a chronometer which keeps ISO standard time. Go ahead and use an hours-minutes-seconds based system so that people get used to it. Forget leap-seconds - no need for that. Forget time zones - no need for that either. We'd probably go to 24-hour time and ditch am/pm since they'd have little meaning in most regions of the world.
An office would set their working hours as 1830-0230 and that would be it. No changing the time in the summer/winter/etc. They could change their hours in the summer/winter though.
An office on the other side of the country might start work at 1700 instead.
There would be no official countrywide designation of starting and stopping time, although most people would expect businesses to be generally open between sunrise and sunset. In 500 years nobody will care that the whole clock has drifted an hour, since the number on the clock doesn't mean anything in the first place. It is just a reference, and it would work fine for that purpose under such a system.
I can't really think of anybody who would be negatively impacted by such a system other than traditionalists. Astronomers would be fine - their star-tracking software probably calculates everything in some internal time format anyway, since the leap-year/leap-second/23h56m business already makes the current 24-hour clock useless for them. If anything, the software would be easier to design since the rules would be deterministic.
No, Athens was DIRECT democracy, not representative democracy.
Remember when someone thought it'd be a good idea to change Pi to equal exactly 3? http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_341.html
Why not use the more sensible and natural 13 moon calendar of the mayans?
could it be?
If we bomb France, we might be able to eliminate the metric system altogether. Did you know that the French are hiding the kilogram at a place called Sevres? Not only that, but it is made of platinum and iridium. I'm pretty sure it's a disguised nukular bomb or some other kind of WMD. Designed to take our freedom away, millimeter by millimeter.
... and then they built the supercollider.
French Revolutionary War Calendar
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
If you would have read the article, the reason behind this is that the moon is slowing the earth down because of it's gravity. Solution? Blow up the moon.
Ancient calendars were based on lunar months, but in order to keep the calendar in step with the seasons, it was necessary to insert extra months, because 12 lunar months are 10.8751234326 days short of a tropical year. The point to be noted is that the Vedic astrology paradigm uses the sidereal zodiac where the relative motion of the solar system itself, in this universe is noted and its precession has been measured @ 50.23 seconds of arc per year. This translates into an additional 20 minutes of time in a solar year.
The Vedic Calendar is the oldest and tries to cover this shortfall of 10.87 days between 12 lunar months and a year by interpolating an extra month every third year called the Adhika Masa.
This was the first approximation and had an inbuilt error of 3.095 days in every 3 years that would tend to shift the seasons back by as much time. This inbuilt error can be rectified by having another Adhika Masa every 30 years i.e. every 30th year has two Adhika Masa (leaves an error of about 1.417 days in 30 years) and yet another every 625 years (i.e. every 625th year has 3 Adhika Masa).
There could be many more in different religions but not thoroughly understood. Instead of reinventing the wheel why not take a look at these different religious texts.
With the moon having an exactly 24 hour rotation around the earth, would it not be better to switch to a lunar calendar and not worry about leap years...ever? No calendar correction would ever be necessary ( unless a something messes with the moon's orbit, and that has not happened yet ).
Doesn't this 'keep it simple' approach sound better than 'keep bandaiding it'? Yes, it is a huge switch as opposed to a minor ajustment, but you would never have to adjust again, and all of your time-keeping processes would be simpler.
On second thought, people would never go for it, it's too easy.
I can't afford a sig!
I have a hardcopy of a book called the Timing Reference Handbook. It is a fairly length tech note from a company called Austron, who got bought by Datum, who got bougth by someone else. At one point I know it was available as a PDF, but a quick search at the Datum website didn't reveal it, though. The interested party should be able to dig it up.
The book describes the difference between the various time bases (UT0, UT1, UT2, UTC, atamic time, etc) and gives some pretty good detail about why we have leap seconds.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
Too terribly busy counting femtoseconds on the atomic clock already, I guess. Add a leap second, and somebody yells, "Ok, Mr. Wise Guy! If you think this is easy...!!!"
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
I can't really think of anybody who would be negatively impacted by such a system other than traditionalists.
Travelers, and virtual travelers (watching a film set in another country where people discuss local time.)
If I remember correctly A Council of Orthodox Churches met in Athens over eighty years ago, in 1923 or 1924. They introduced an improved Gregorian calendar which is identical with the regular Gregorian Calendar until 2800+something. I believe this improved Grtegorian Calendar is used by Orthodox Churches all over the world for computing the dates of their religious holidays.
I read about this in the seventies, in an old astronomy book published in 1930-35.I dont have this book anymore ad thus I cant check if the years 123-24 and 1930-35 are correct ot not. I am sure however that otherwise the information is correct.
Yeah, representative democracy was Roman.
And if it was good enough for the Romans, then it is good enough for me.
In other news, Bush thinks that "pi = 3" is "close enough for Jesus".
--
make install -not war
GPS time does not include leap seconds.
... now that we have TiVo?
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
Maybe we should all consider wearing one of these atomic wristwatches to keep track of all these changes.
I think this is a fabulous idea for precisely the reason the "classical astronomers" think it's a bad one. It's time to break the connection between timekeeping and the astronomical accidents of the Earth. Clarke was right -- if we have much of a future at all, then for most of human history, "ship" will mean "spaceship".
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I went looking for it but at first all I found was the story from July 7th covering the addition of a leap second to the end of 2005. It is Link .
But what I was remembering came as a listener's response, Link . The story covers a few different subjects. The responses to the leap second story start at about one minute in. In particular:
I wonder if the UN meeting was really secret or just ignored.
Dale
PS: BTW, the T&F Div. of NIST is commendably responsive when you email them to say that time-a.nist.gov is unreachable from the public Internet.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
A Pan-Orthodox Congress (not a Council) was held in Athens in 1923 and they indroduced an improved Gregorian Calendar.
p xp xo kletos3-AK319.pdf
Google provides the following links:
http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/photii_1.as
http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/photii_2.as
www.synodinresistance.gr/Dioikisi_en/E1a5d001cThe
It seems that there was a strong reaction to the new calendar, some people, churches and organizations would not accept it.
My view on all this DST and Leap Second arguement is... let them, why the hell do we care?
So what if the ignorant Bush Administration wants to change time - is there going to be a penalty if we ignore them? Let them have their own time standard - fine. Who the fuck cares. We'll simply go on using the RIGHT and PROPER time, not some stupid time made-up by politicians who are only swayed by lavish gifts from special intrest groups.
What, are the FBI going to break down our doors and haul us off for using the wrong time?
This is the thing I don't get... nobody is going to FORCE us to change the time of our computers or our telescopes. What, is there now going to be a little winding button on our atomic clocks so we can 'adjust' them to match BUSH TIME? I don't think so.
Well, UNIX time is calculated as the number of seconds since 1970. When you convert GPS time to UNIX time, you have a 12 second difference (or is it now 13?). This is a really big deal in the GPS world and caused us many headaches.
I can understand this difference complicates software, but you cant redefine the second just because it's inconvenient.
But, on the other hand, if software problems are the motivating concern, why are they trying to change daylight savings time -- do they understand how many embedded systems (let alone desktops and servers) are gonna have the wrong time!?
From the Article: Eliminating leap seconds will make sextants and sundials slowly become inaccurate, but supporters say that's OK now that the satellite-supported GPS can give exact longitude and latitude bearings to anyone with a receiver. Sailors "don't navigate with the stars any longer," said Dr. McCarthy.
This is obviously an attempt by global, one-world government power brokers to stop the rebel masses from relying on NATURE for navigation, forcing us to rely soley upon government-controlled GPS, so that when we secretly lauch our anti-one-world-governemt naval forces against the one-world U.N. headquarters in New York City, using NATURE for our navigation instead of GPS (because they will see us coming if we use their GPS system), our navigation timing will be so far off that we will actually launch an attack upon Nantucket, Mass. in error, causing extreme public outrage at our anti-one-world government movement and a total acceptance of the evil Global Dictator's plan for us all, including RFID tags under our fingernails, a 51 percent Worldwide Internet Sales Tax, TV sets that monitor our every move, and an outright ban of tin-foil hats so that their GPS "eyes in sky" can read our brainwaves anywhere in the world. An evil, but brilliant plan.
I can see it now, in the year 2505 a United Planets resolution will propose that because computer programs weren't built to handle a 25 hour day, we should make a leap day once every 12000 years
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
Your country is wrong!
I'm tellin' ya, it's as plain as the nose on the Sphinx:
Ya let 'em steal an election twice in a row and they think they can just change up any ol' thing they want!
Get 'em out of the gene pool; this biosphere doesn't need 'em!
I'm too lazy to go Google it right now, but I think the point is pertinent/interesting to this crowd -
:P
With our current system of leap seconds, does the Unix timestamp actually reflect the CORRECT number of seconds since Jan 1st, 1970?
Sure some of the Unices are probably different but I'm guessing that many of the implementations of the algorithm calculate the seconds with basic math using only leap years as the deviation from standard.
Ah, hell, maybe I'll go google it, too, but, I'll still ask here.
"This is Zombo Com, and welcome to you who have come to Zombo Com" - www.zombo.com
Forget time zones - no need for that either
I can see it now... the day will shift mid-day. Try programming that one! The 23rd of August (for example) will change over in the MIDDLE OF A WORKDAY! Not only that, it'll change over at a different time in the work day (so sun's position, but in your proposal not physical time) for every region.
The whole point of time zones is to keep time reasonably standard no matter where you are. I can travel half way across the world and I still wake up at 8am, eat lunch at noon, dinner at 7pm, etc. The concept of a day is very engrained in us. Today is a Saturday! Imagine if it was also sunday based on my location.
Besides- the US would want to manage it, so they'd end up with the same time scheme they have now (probably picking up EST or Mountain as their base zone), while the rest of the world rolls over laughing at their proposal.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
While they are at it how about doing the same with daylight savings time?
They are making DST longer that standard time now which will most likely cause some computers to have significant problems.
Get rid of DST entirely. If people want to adjust schedules for some perceived benefit of saving energy then just getup an hour earlier or later and change their start times that way instead of mucking with the clocks.
If you thought the year 2000 problem was bad, just wait until 2505.
The real question here is: why does the U.S. government feel the need to keep this secret? What are they scared of? Is there some less-obvious detail they're really fighting for here?
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
I'd be more concerned if they were flying planes with margins of error of less than a second.
Besides- it doesn't matter what the actual time is with technology, but rather the relative time. As long as the planes obey the same second tick, who cares.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
the protestant countries (including britain and america) didn't change until the 1700s, and the eastern orthodox ones like russia not until the early part of the 20th century.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
I hate to break it to you, but even though today is Saturday, it is in fact Sunday somewhere while it is Saturday for you, under the current system. Under the proposal by the grandparent, it would be 13:00 Saturday everywhere in the world at the same time - but you probably wouldn't use an obsolete term like Saturday, and half the world would be asleep. As far as locality of time reference, I would imagine that for mundane traditional purposes we would re-purpose traditional words like "morning, noon, afternoon, evening", etc to mean relative to the sun where-ever you are. And when you want to speak with more precision than simple sun-terms like that, you specify "13:42", which only has sun-relevance in your own local area, but means the same instant in time everywhere.
11*43+456^2
The true story is that The Orthodox Churches were the last to accept the Gregorian Calendar. Since the Gregorian Calendar was introduced by the Catholic Church, the Protestant Churches said it was an invention of the Devil and would not accept it for two centuries. In the 18th Century the ration prevailed and the Gregorian Calendar was accepted by almost all Protestant Churches. The Orthodox Churches were even slower, it took them other two centuries to give up the Julian Calendar. When they eventually decided to do it, they were ashamed they waited four hundred years and thus came up with something better than the Gregorian Calendar. They claimed they did not accept the Gregorian Calendar for four hundred years because it was not good enough for them.
Now the US government wants to do what the Orthodox Churches did 80 years ago.
Before 1923 all Orthodox Countries used the Julian Calendar. For example, even today the Russian Communist Revolution is called the 'Great Revolution of October' even though it started on November 7 (New Style). At the time of the Great Revolution of October the difference between the two calendars was two weeks.
From article:
But adding these ad hoc "leap seconds" -- the last one was tacked on in 1998 -- can be a big hassle for computers operating with software programs that never allowed for a 61-second minute, leading to glitches when the extra second passes.
Why would anyone need to set a 61-second minute to account for leap time other than the guys at NIST in charge of the official time? Just set all your computerized clocks to network sync. We have a network time server that re-syncs itself ever hour and then everything else checks that occasionaly. I've never had to do anything about a leap second except maybe be off by a second for a few hours until time resets itself...
That 0.01% of businesses that require absolute perfect time need to hire better software programmers rather than fscking with how we define time.
"OMGZ! Motorolla screwed up in 2003, and some Russians did the same in 1997! Let's pass a law to protect them!!!"
--
Don't fight Firefox! Let FireFox fight YOU!
sunrise to sunset is a different period of time depending on the time of year & your latitude.
so this may not work too well for northern or southern areas, as they'd only be open a few hours in winter, but could have to open for 20 hours in summer, or even 24 hours in arctic & antartic regions.
4. ???
5. Profit
Because there are not enough desktop clock applets in the world. And the glyphs are pretty!
Who wants to wait til 2038 to fix time keeping standards anyway?
Government messing with universals? Is it like the state government if Indiana passing a motion to reset the value of Pi?
There would be no official countrywide designation of starting and stopping time, although most people would expect businesses to be generally open between sunrise and sunset. In 500 years nobody will care that the whole clock has drifted an hour, since the number on the clock doesn't mean anything in the first place. It is just a reference, and it would work fine for that purpose under such a system.
I can't really think of anybody who would be negatively impacted by such a system other than traditionalists.
Wow, great idea! I don't really care whether I wake up in the dark or in sunlight, and probably most people in the world don't really care either (it's really just a antiquated scheduling mechanism).
Then 500 years from now people will look back and realize how backward we were to think that the sun is somehow connected to life on earth, and business can carry on as normal.
See the postings below about the Pan Orthodox Congress in Athens, 1923.
but, it's all because of poor programming on legacy embedded code in various weapons systems left over from the cold war. every time the leap second occurs the men in the bunkers think that something somewhere is going to trigger. plus, don't forget some of the crap they put in orbit that we don't know about. this is just a cheap way of not having to service assets in space that we can no longer reach easily whilst the shuttles are grounded - and that includes the military birds too.
i'm joking/speculating/revealing the truth (delete as applicable)
Anyone who thinks that leap seconds could pose a problem to computer systems is an idiot!
Chances are most servers do not have the exact time, and if they did, it's probably because they're using NTP, in which case they would get the adjustment without knowing it.
Last I knew, it's impossible for a computer system to maintain precise time over a couple of years. If all your servers have the same exact time, you're using NTP, end of story.
Why is it easier to add/remove an whole hour (daylight savings time) than a second?
Why worry about leap seconds if time doesn't exist?
I have some lead food containers to sell you...
Yeah you probably wouldn't use day names like that, but that's really the point. We're not talking about adjusting time but changing the way you think of a day in its entirety. We're talking about a shift in how we think, what we do, and the basic concepts we all grew up in. Midnight is being out late, noon is sleeping in late, etc. The concept of a Weekend locally is very important, as is the beginning and end of the day.
I'm not saying it's not possible in the least, but it changes how we think a lot more than I think the parent thought of. You're not just changing the time, but rather changing how we think of a day, week, etc.
And to what gain? Timezone's aren't that bad. They make a day a standard thing in local terms. While the avoidance of them is super for computers and international business, it sucks horribly for locals all over the world.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Well, Windows runs under decimal time and I'm fairly sure that most unix systems count in seconds and milliseconds.
60 has factors of (1),2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30 making it easy to deal with a fraction of an hour.
I assume by decimal time you mean 100's not 10's
100 has factors of (1),2,4,5,10,20,25,50 making it quite a bit harder to deal with fractions of an hour.
But what would you put into your crontab? You don't want to run your backup-which-slows- the-system-considerably to occur in the middle of the workday, so you would probably set it to some relative time, like "sunrise - 5 hours".
And if techies couldn't cope with it, what about normal people. They would start almost instantly to use a relative time (or keep to the old time, government be damned). So it would only diminish the usefulness of "official time" and lead to more chaos.
- Erwin
Potential errors in adding 'leap seconds' is causing screw-ups in computer systems. The main cause is sloppy programming so eliminating them makes everything better. Don't have to worry about it for 500-600 years.
Ask yourself who benefits from this. The only answer I can come up with is software programmers, specifically OS programmers (programs usually read what time the OS is reporting). Which OS manufacturer has the most clout with the US gov.? Which company is reported to have the most liquid cash? To take a quote from Mr. Moore: Who your Daddy?
The GEEK shall inherit the earth...
The irony of course is that if we do let the U.S. do whatever the hell it wants on this, as usual, there won't be an Earth 500 years from now, so it really is a good solution.
Actually, exposure to sunlight is good for things other than making programmers look a little less pasty-white: vitamin D absorption and staving off seasonal affective disorder, just to name two off the top of my head.
I don't really see the point of all this. Simply standardize on Eastern Standard Time and be done with it. The rest of the world will learn to adjust to it.
While technology may or may not progress, it is pretty certain that human nature will remain the same.
It's human nature that will make this a crisis, despite any amout of technological progress.
To fix the problem of procrastination causing crisis, you need to fix society not technology.
Currently fixing society is not considered doable, or ethical.
The proposal is infact disingenuous.
The honest proposal would be to say that leap-seconds are scrapped.
We will let clock time diverge from celestial time, and tackle the problem when it becomes a crisis,
or some other junior poltician in 250 years time wants to make their mark on history.
The same U.S. which still uses antiquated units like inch, feet, pound...
Great idea! This will absolutely improve their level of science. Maybe to a level where the rest of the world does not need to fear a military 'liberation'; no two gps devices will give the same coords, the mighty war-machine ends up scattered over the globe.
And the cost-saving when NASA gives up space-travel; after finding out (the hard way) that fucking with all current formulas on the laws of motion by throwing a few constants out of whack might interfere with the ability to hit anything. Heck I always thought we should do another voyager project.
I don't see how the problem occurs in the first place. The internal clock used by computers is integer based, and converted by the OS or programming APIs to readable strings.
Oracle, Sybase, DB/2, and presumably other RDBMS software stores date/time using internal numeric formats and converts that to YMD HMS strings when the values are retrieved by code.
Mainframe systems written in COBOL use library APIs for their date/time manipulation, which properly allow for leap seconds. IIRC, even ancient PL/I code relies on such libraries.
When I worked on HP RTE-A systems to do satellite control (almost 20 years ago), we used integers counting seconds and milliseconds as time references, not "human readable" date fields.
Unless some "not invented here" bozo is writing their own date/time manipulation code instead of relying on the system/language libraries there should be no problem with leap seconds.
And lets not forget that all the major systems code was re-examined and retooled to deal with Y2K, so there is absolutely no excuse for existing code that doesn't deal with date/time properly.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Once there was a boy, who longed to be as well known as Julius Caesar. First he gathered his legionnaires and started some wars, but he didn't get the respect from the public he wanted. Then he had a brilliant idea. Julius had a calendar named after him, maybe he could get one too. All he had to do was come up with a plan to show those pesky scientists that time was controlled by God, not some mathematical constant, and if God wanted it to jump ahead by an hour every 5 or 6 hundred years, then dammit, that is what is going to happen. He decided to call his invention the Dubyan calendar, because if he called it Georgian, people might give his daddy credit for it, or even worse, some limey king that died last century.
you know what? They are almost correct. The entire time system sucks! Who was the programmer of that shit? Let's screw it completely an make it decimal. And without leap hours or 29th februeary.
then the US could claim that Washington DC was located at God's Longitude - just like the british wanted to do 5 centuries ago. http://www.mikeoates.org/mas/history/lectures/2001 0118.htm
"500 years ago, people weren't reading, they weren't really doing much of anything productive. It wasn't until the Renaissance that things really started humming."
Actually the intellectual and technical foundations for what historians call the "Renaissance" were being laid, or at least rediscovered, in the Middle Ages. And people were reading and writing then as well, though in western society it was mostly done by monks.
Also, you are forgetting that, during this period, Islamic society was far more advanced. I can assure you that they were being VERY productive. Without the Islamic preservation of ancient Greek texts and their translations, the European Renaissance may not have happened at all.
When looking at the headline and seeing my native USA flag, I couldn't help but think that before long it might be analogous to Fark's "Florida" tag.
i.e. "Look what these crazies are doing now!"
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
It is actually more like:
1. The Americans want to do X1,X2,X3,...,Xn for a large n
2. X1,...Xn are all bad
3. Therefore the Americans are bad.
qed
Linux is not Windows
Or if you are exactly on the North or South pole, you'd be open for about 4,380 hours a day. I'd imagine a chronomoter would really make a lot more sense for people there, as there is only one sunrise (spring) and one sunset (autumn) in a year. And, trying to figure out what time zone you're in can be a little hairy too.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
500 years ago, people weren't reading, they weren't really doing much of anything productive.
... great grandchildren will grow up to post something stupid on something called the Internet."
& p=2 (the last post at the bottom). Compare that with what you hear people say about Jesus (the non-fireman one).
Except growing food, raising livestock, getting married, raising children, defending themselves, scheming, talking with neighbors, and saying, "Someday Martha, one of our great great great great great
I wonder if there were a huge leap second buildup whether people would just start waking up according to the absolute time rather than the political time.
Time is an arbitrary concept created by man. People get up according to when they have to be at work, and if that isn't sometime in the morning they get up when it is convenient for them. Some people have to be at work at 8, others at 9, some at 6 or 7. Where does politics come into this? All the government does is produce a standard benchmark time so we can communicate about time, and know that we will be understood.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Did he really? Unless this is Jesus the Hispanic fireman, I don't buy it. Either a magic supernatural man in the clouds helped you, or you are confused about it. Occham's Razor anyone?
To illustrate this point, I encourage people to read this: http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2800
I hate to break it to you, but even though today is Saturday, it is in fact Sunday somewhere while it is Saturday for you, under the current system.
I live on the Christmas Islands, you insensetive clod!
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I'd like a three day weekend. And could august last for another week, maybe two? I really like august.
While the avoidance of them is super for computers and international business, it sucks horribly for locals all over the world.
Not really. we've already adjusted and programmed computers to deal with timezones. What's the point of making lives complicated for billions of people, just to solve a problem that doesn't even exist anymore?
Speak before you think
Computer systems "supposedly" can't handle a 61 second minute according to the article. What makes people think it can handle a 25 hour day in 500 years? Try putting a patch in some 500 or 600 year old software.
The Moon orbits the Earth every 27.3 days, not every 24 hours.
The Earth rotates once in a 24 hour period.
The Earth's rotation is gradually slowing, due to the gravitational influence of the Moon.
The length of the year has NOTHING to do with the Moon!
The Year is the time it takes for the Earth to travel once around the Sun.
Each orbit around the Sun (each year) takes a slightly different period of time than previous orbits. This is due to the gravitational influence of other bodies in the solar system (but not the moon).
Leap seconds are inserted to correct for the variation in the length of the year. This correction is necessary for agriculture, navigation and astromomy. Due to the chaotic nature of orbital mechanics, you can't predict exactly when a leap second will be needed.
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
First off, you just missed the entire freaking point of the paragraph you cut and pasted. In the absence of Beijing allowing people to live in separate time zones (ala Russia, Canada, US, etc), the people have chosen to implement their own time zones because that's what they want. A global standard for time like this has little purpose when people rarely cross integer numbers of degrees of longitude throughout the course of the day and would rather have a local, sun-based standard that attempts to divide the day into parts based not on where the sun is in the UK, but where the sun is where you're standing right now.
We're diurnal creatures and we liking having a time standard that takes that into account. You can't wish away biology with some global standard.
"My feeling is that they should simply have a chronometer which keeps ISO standard time. "
You misspelled BIPM.
"An office would set their working hours as 1830-0230 and that would be it. No changing the time in the summer/winter/etc. They could change their hours in the summer/winter though."
So, instead of just having to deal with jet lag when I cross multiple degrees of longitude in a short amount of time, I also have to cope with the fact that the operating hours of businesses I've grown accustomed to where I live have absoluntely no meaning here. Instead of today's world where, upon arriving, I simply press a few buttons on my watch, I now have to constantly apply a mathematical operation to what my watch says ("If I'm used to somethign happening at time X at home, then it must happen at X-Y here..."), that all but elminates the purpose of having a timepiece to begin with. I want to know what part of the day it is for the people around me, the people I have to interract with, and if a timepiece can't do that (indeed, begisn to serve as an obstacle to it), it's lost its purpose. I would literally be better off looking at the position of the sun in the sky, thereby eliminating several centuries of progress.
And where you suggest that businesses change their hours instead of simply changing the frame of reference (which is what DST represents), you're advocating a system that would bree chaos. Changing the frame of reference, by definition, is uniform. Every business continues to be adequately synchronized with the other businesses they must deal with in the course of the day. If everybody has to change their own hours, then all you'd do is introduce confusion until everybody agreed on a regular, synchronized change of hours outside of the so-called standard you're proposing (making the standard useless). And even then it would be less efficient than simply changing the clocks.
Have you ever had a physics class? If a problem is set in an ugly change of reference, would you rather constantly have to apply a long list of ugly transforms, or would you rather save yourself a lot of time and effort and simply change the frame of reference?
"An office on the other side of the country might start work at 1700 instead."
Your system also complicates communications across long distances. Time zones simplifies differences in time between two locations into an integer number of hours, allowing a simple calculation to be done after glancing at a clock set in the local frame of reference. Without time zones, everybody would attempt to set their operating times accoridng to time at the local meridian (again, going back to local solar time and making mechanical time standards worthless), and you'd be lucky if the difference between your times and theirs was an integer number of minutes. Intercontinental communications would require a degree of pre-arrangement (to first learn their hours of operation) to make sure that when you attempt to call them, they're there to answer the phone. On the other hand, today I know that businesses across the country (if not across the world) tend to stick with a "nine to five" work day, and all I would need to know is what state or country my
"Pi is exactly three! Very sorry that it had to come to that..."
Why is it the same people who propose letting the UN take over and drasticly change the way the Internet works, are the same people who think it will be the end of world soveriegnty if the UN gets rid of leap seconds?
I can see being against the UN restructuring the Internet, and being against the change of our time system. I can see being for having the UN restructuring the Internet, and also being for it restructuring our time system.
But it seems that people on Slashdot don't really have any consistant political views. They have some weird, inconsistant, rejection of things based on emotion and superficial politcal fashion.
But adding these ad hoc "leap seconds" -- the last one was tacked on in 1998 -- can be a big hassle for computers operating with software programs that never allowed for a 61-second minute, leading to glitches when the extra second passes. "It's a huge deal," said John Yuzdepski...
Umm, so why don't we just make one second every so often last two seconds. Instead of being the 61st second, it would just be 59 seconds past the minute for 2 seconds long. Seems like that wouldn't break stuff, unless you're doing some very time sensitive number crunching.
Sounds like a good idea to me. Any discontinuity injected into the timeline is a major nightmare for programmers. I work for a software house that deals with lots of time-series data e.g. Electricity usage per hour. We have a lot of clever people with first class degrees in Computer Science, Physics etc and the Daylight savings changes still confuse the hell out of us. It's fine if you can work in UTC and just convert when displaying to the user but our software has to work internally with clock time and everyone seems to make different mistakes. Are any programmers here familiar with this particular brand of hell?
why don't we switch to metric already and stop worrying about leap seconds.
Well as long as we're doing all this converting can I make a request that we finally finish totally converting to the metric system? :)
I realize that the US has already accepted it as a official standard, but a lot of the measurements are put in the English system and metric system.
As a tech person used to dealing with the metric system on a daily basis, I would welcome it. It's a whole lot less confusing, and it'd be nice to not to have to constantly stop and think whenever I'm talking to colleagues in other countries that only understand metrics.
"The boy is dangerous, they all sense it, why can't you?"
500 years ago, people weren't reading, they weren't really doing much of anything productive. It wasn't until the Renaissance that things really started humming.
Of course, you're ignoring the society which kick-started the Renaissance and speaking primarly of Europe.
"A good compromise leaves everyone mad." -Calvin
Save up the one hour for every 500 years until there's a whole year's worth. Then we can have a leap year. Once every 4,383,000 years.
A law passed now to cause this to happen then is only marginally less likely to be followed than a law passed now to be followed 500 or 600 years from now.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The article says that without leap-seconds the sun would start rising "a few seconds later each decade", but this would be compensated for by a leap-HOUR every 500-600 years. That equates to around 7 leap-seconds per YEAR though, which is much more that what is currently used. Even if the earth's rotation continues to slow, it's not slowing THAT much. In fact, it's been speeding up lately.
OK, so lets get this strait. We will do away with the tried and true 'physical' way of measuring time with something that does the same thing every day no matter what we do(the sun), and replace it with computers. Which we all know are perfect, run forever, always work everyday no matter what we do, even if a nuke goes off or some other means of emitting a huge electro-magnetic pulse disabling every electronic device around.....oh wait, i think that might actually effect the computer. I think when it comes to something like time, something that we need to run our country and world, we should leave the defining factors out of our control. We tend to break things a lot. And time is something we don't need the ability to break. I think God knew that and thats why he put the tool on the top shelf.
w00t
I just think it'd be cool if we sanded the moon perfectly round. It's so messy right now.
Those who are worried about leap seconds only need to adjust their clocks to the International Atomic Time (TAI). It is kept by the same atomic clocks as UTC, but doesn't have the leap seconds.
It makes sense to use TAI in airplanes, and it makes sense to use UTC in telescopes. Why would they need to use the same?
that the scientists expect that the rate of Earth's rotation will slow fairly dramatically in the next few hundred years, likely due to global warming.
Do the math. If they expect to need a leap hour in 600 years, that means that they expect six extra seconds a year -- not just one every couple of years. This is a huge increase.
I presume that the reason for this is that the mass of the earth will be moving somewhat further away from the axis, due to the ocean levels rising somewhat. An increase in the time for 365 rotations of 6 seconds a year is about equivalent to a 5 meter rise in ocean levels (more or less).
I find it interesting that when the threat of global warming is convenient, the US gov't has no problem taking it into account, as we see in this case. Of course, at other times, it's just a myth.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
We didn't need a leap second during the 7 year span from 1998 through 2005. Apparently we hit a slick patch in space or something and it sped up, or at least failed to slow down. We just need to speed up the rotation of the earth. The way to speed up the rotation of the earth is to sink a great deal of weight from the crust to the core. It will spin up like an ice skater pulling in their appendages.
I propose we drill holes to the core and dump in all copies of National Geographic. It has been known for a long time (http://www.jir.com/geographic.html) that the accumulation of National Geographic magazines will end up weighing so much that it will cause coastlines to sink.
Bury them in the core, save the coastal cites, and solve the leap second problem all at once. I'll bet you wish you'd saved all those old issues of Byte now.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Sure, the year number is essentially an arbitrary but monotonically increasing value. But that's only because we're all stuck here on this same ball of rock. If we survive long enough to establish a Martian colony (not totally unrealistic within the 500-year planning horizon of these blathering politicians) things will change.
Remember, those intrepid folks on Mars will have a different length of year. Suddenly it would become important to reconcile future dates that cross year boundaries on both planets. Earth Years and Mars Years will certainly need to be regulated (in the sense of reliable astronomical standards, not government burdens).
Not laws of physics to your life.
And yet, just like the Soviet Union's Politburo, many of the MBA's and businesses would like time time to work to their schedule. They want physics to work for them, whether there's 1000 dead cosmonauts or 1000 dead ballistic-submarine sailors.
You will keep the reactor running, comrade, or I will find someone else that can keep the reactor running.
Rather than redefining their working hours to meet daylight, they want to keep the same 6am-9pm schedule, constantly. This is retarded. Change your business hours on a published monthly schedule. You bloody know how many hours of daylight you're going to have, because the Farmer's Almanac has been published since Christ was Lord.
This is a complete abortion. If I was a conspiracist, I'd think the United States of America wanted to make everyone dependent on GPS systems for navigation, so it would be like an economic nuclear bomb if GPS was ever shut off in your area. But it's probably just MBA wankers that want to play golf and have their shop open every day at 6am.
...but IF and ONLY IF the thirteenth month is called Smarch.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Time zones destroy any possible contention that our method of measuring time is accurate. Accuracy demands that noon be when the sun is at its highest point in the sky. With the introduction of time zones, noon ceased to be accurate except at a vanishingly small strip in the middle of the zone, assuming that the zone is even symmetrically laid out. So you folks are arguing over a second a year when your local time can be out as much as ONE HALF HOUR, even when standard time is in effect, or even more in areas where the zones have been artificially altered for geopolitical reasons.
As for the dodos in Washington who think this will convince us they are doing something about the coming energy crisis, they are playing to an ever decreasingly smaller group of no-nothings who wouldn't know a real answer if it got up and bit them. I am beginning to think the ancient Stone Agers had the right idea when they would have the local king for lunch at the end of his allotted year in office.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
"Remember this day people, 80 past 2 on April 47th"
but they think they're qualified to design time.
Crazy fucking Americans.
It's annoyingly common for the U.S. Congress to pass laws which push off responsibility to future generations, and this is just another example. I wonder if anyone has made a compendium of the lawmakers which introduce legislation which defers responsibility like this. Probably not, because every spending bill would then be like that.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
While I somewhat understand the point, I am unfamiliar with people who speak of "two fifths after the hour." I'm not sure having additional factors improves timekeeping semantics.
With less and less Americans are entering CompSci and Engineering, this must be sensible planning to handle the fact that sooner or later American will be run by chimps (oh wait...).
Make that tech staff will have degraded to the point they can't handle modern issues.
Next up: All traffic lights to be replaced with Stop Signs, which are much easier to build and maintain.
Intercontinental communications already require a degree of pre-arrangement, it's just that someone already did it for you. Someone already coordinated working hours and time zones.
However, if there were only one time zone I would have to find out when people work, but after I found out when they work I wouldn't have to do any math to figure out what time that was to me.
I also can't figure out why you think businesses would adjust their schedules to local noon, as opposed to adjusting their clocks to matches the businesses that they work with. Companies with nation interests are already open from 8 AM EST to 5 PM PST, because that when they do business with are open. Why wouldn't these businesses continue to be open from the time that their eastmost clients open to the time that their westmost clients close?
The 9-5 standard didn't come out of daylight hours. 9-5 came out of daylight hours, but it became standard because there's a distinict economic advantage to being open at the same time as your business partners. I don't see any reason to think that eliminating time zones would change that.
Actually they weren't the last bunch of people to mess with the calender.
Bush simply wants one more second added to his term. That's all!
(ok ok ok, sorry!)
Another thing: it's about time we got rid of that pesky non-repeating infinite crap that pi gives us. Let's pass a law that pi = 3, because when I make a circular thing that's ten cubits from rim to rim, it sucks that it doesn't take exactly thirty cubits to measure around it! Cutting sheet metal for cylindrical tubs is too hard -- have you ever tried to measure out 31.4159265358979323846... cubits? You can't even write it out!
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
between the US minute and the rest of the world?
I could imagine that the problems that arise when the rest of the world would just go on with the leap second. Those would be a LOT bigger then the odd leap second.
At what time would the Space Shuttle make contact with the Space station? Would that be US time, GMT time, or should we just hope for the best?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
He hit the nail on the head!!
Waiting until we are an hour off to realign with the earth's actual rotation would be like waiting till we were a full month off to adjust for the solar orbit.
Finally someone got it right! It has nothing to do with GMT and everything to do with common sense. Thank you!
--
Google innovative? Phhfft! This is Zombo-com!
I like the idea of no time zones. While it might be confusing to travel, it's much easier to communicate, which is done much more often.
You can fool some of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, and that is sufficient.
We already have to deal with the fact that local time zones change unpredictably, so the unpredictable odd leap second is no more difficult to deal with than the unpredictable change of the dates for daylight savings time.
For example, now GMT = UTC and EST = UTC - 05:00:00 (midnight in New York is 5 AM in London). After a leap second, we would have GMT = UTC - 00:00:01 and EST = UTC - 05:00:01, and midnight in New York is still 5 AM in London.
This is so obvious, it has zero chance of ever being implemented... Prove me wrong, please!
Didn't you read the post above? Timezone's make it possible to quickly estimate what time it is in Singapore right now even though I'm living in New York. With no timezone's I'd have to bust out a sextant, look up some astronomical indexes for the country (sunrise, sunset statisitcs), or see if anyone remmebers what the difference used to be before we quit using time zones.
Stop intellectual property from infringing on me
I'd expect to read that "nothing productive" happened during the medieval period from a self-proclaimed "Enlightened" thinker. But I'm a little surprised to hear it from a person with a Christian sig. Please google for Scholasticism.
but I'm sure you know people who work with 10 or 5 minute blocks. that's 1/6 and 1/12 and not possible with metric.
If we all had 6 fingers on each hand math would be a whole lot easier.
although most people would expect businesses to be generally open between sunrise and sunset.
Most businesses in Alaska would not appreciate being open 24 hours a day in the summer, being closed for most of winter, and having "normal" workdays during the spring and fall.
This would also make it difficult to work with vendors accross the country. With the current system it is relatively easy to compute when a vendor in Maine will be open for business since most businesses open at 8am. If the decision of which time offset to use becomes arbitray to a specific area, you would need chart for every locale you wish to do business with, since cities in Maine may choose a different starting hour than those in New York, or worse yet the starting hour may change from county to county. Currently most states fall within one of four timezones and follow DST (with the exception of Utah). These four time zones are reasonably easy to memorize and make it easier for business on different sides of the content to do business.
The thing that struck me the most is they claim GPS systems solve the need for tracking stars. Anyone that has been involved with developing GPS software (or most any satellite system) knows that GPS time uses the leap second value to convert from UTC time (GPS Time = UTC Time + leap seconds since epoch) So... to drop leap seconds would mean GPS time would also have to be changed.
Or, you know, we still use 5 or 10 minute blocks and just call them 1/20 or 1/10 of an hour.
Hmmm... I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this, but why not just set the clock forward or backward a second when it's convenient ? Like currently setting it for changes in the hour for DST/BST.
An hour added every 500 years would be the equivalent of 7.2 seconds per year. Perhaps it should be a minute added every 500 years -- that would be a second every 8 years or so which seems closer to the actual rate of leap seconds.
This must be a faith-based initiative.
Notice that it is impossible to change all software. So long as tricky rules are around, there will be software that does not follow the rules correctly.
There are things you can do in your own software, such as religiously avoiding re-implementing things you know are tricky. For that matter, however, it's good to religious avoid re-implementing anything anyway, tricky or not.
An additional lesson, though, is that your perfect software may end up needing to interoperate with software that screws it up. If you want robust software, it had better not insist that the other software it communicates with can be synchronized to the second with your local computer and can furthermore deal with 61-second minutes.
It looks like my government is at it again so I had to comment:
1. Iraq - mustached leaders are evil and had to be dealt with. Dude should have shaved. ... come on ajoshi, you're just asking for it.
2. Iran - sounds way too similar to Iraq; may want to change name back to Persia to get off AOE radar. Prince of Persia -- cool. Prince of Iran?
3. North Korea - synchronized marching men AND leader in Dr. Evil suit (not to forget his I-don't -care-what-you-think-attitude permed hair)
4. Leaping Seconds - you're next buddy; you've been causing way too much misery to the freedom enjoying nations around the world. Do you know how much anguish you cause the good American citizens year after year after year? Almost as bad as programming VHS VCRs.
5. Metric System - liters this and meters that?... why should measurements have to make sense? Ohhhh yeahhh... that's right... you can run... but you can't hide...
Related links:e rIssueEntityId=373 9 &tid=103&tid=164
http://www.charlesjo.com/newsletterissue?newslett
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/30/13523
Charles Jo
I (ahem)in my wasted youth wrote a s/390 assembler program to return the computer's idea of time. It also (via a hand-maintained maintained) table accounted for leap seconds.
I'll see whether I can find it. It's called 'GoodTime.asm'. If I can resurrect it and test it with Hercules m/f (mainframe), I'll put it up for grabs.
ted@php.net
Official Pi Ambassador -- inquire for details!
Yeah, but it's rumored the US already made up their minds to invade time anyway. The rest is just for show.
Isn't this a bit like the 1897 farcical attempt of Indiana to legislate the value of ð (Pi)?
Silly US legislature.
-l
I think the US proposal does not go far enough: I am a software engineer (yes, our systems support leap seconds by manual entry of the due date) and our job (writing software for satellite ground systems) would be much easier if we had decimal time: 100 seconds/minute, 100 minutes/day, 10 hours/day, 100 days/year etc.
And whilst we are at it can we ditch this miles and pounds nonsense: everyone should use nice, programmer friendly kilometers and kilogrammes.
Heh, I found this link in the /. synopsis very interesting. The Naming of the months is something that has interested me & I've speculated on a bit. I knew that the first months were named for Roman Gods:
Janus
Februus
Mars
Aphrodite (actually a Greek goddess, but the Romans identified their gods and the Greek gods together)
Maia (another Greek goddess, the Roman name is Bona Dea)
Juno
I also knew that July and August were named after Julius & Augustus Caesar. After August, the months are named with their numbers.
September (7)
October (8)
November (9)
December (10)
But wait! Those numbers aren't right! And here began my speculation. I figured the Romans (like most 10-fingered humans) were fond of 10 (X in Roman numerals), so they may have started with 10 months (which actually is the case). I also assumed that August and July were the last months added to the calender, based of their being named after Julius and Augustus Caesar (this assumption turns out to be false; January and February were the last months to be added to the Roman calender: the Romans originally considered winter to be monthless). I found the (incorrect, of course) conclusion of my speculation to be rather humourous: the Roman calender began with ten months, until Julius Caesar came along, and decided he was important enough that he deserved his own month, and so he created July. He wasn't arrogant enough to think he was more important than the gods, but he was more important than just a bunch of numbers, so he sticks July after the months named after the gods, but before the numbered months. That changes the numbering, but the names from the old numbering stuck. Augustus Caesar dittoed Julius Caesar.
Sadly, the explanation based on research rather than speculation that Wikipedia gives for the number mismatch is not so humourous. They simply say that March was originally the first month. But I always thought (incorrectly, it seems) that January was named for Janus, the god of Beginnings and Endings, because it was the first month of the year, that marked the end of the old year and the beginning of the new year. But even when January became the first month, it wasn't because of Janus, but rather because the Roman consuls had a year long term, and took office on the 1st of January.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
I wake up and eat breakfast in the morning (after the sun comes up).
I eat lunch at mid-day (when the sun is roughly over head).
I eat dinner in the evening (usually when the sun is starting to descend).
I go to sleep at night (after dark.)
Does it really matter if I wake up at 0000 isntead of 0800? Does dinner taste differently at 1900 than it does at 1100?
Curious.
Kid-proof tablet..
"Time is a measure, therefore they actually do thave the authority to regulate it."
Yeah, but let's make sure this isn't like when the State of Indiana when they tried unsuccessfully to legally solidify Pi as 3.2 in 1897.
Now, if only people got serious about real time reform, and not only disconnected the link between time and the sun, but also did away with DST, Timezones, a Base 12/60 numerical time hybrid, and disconnected the calendar and the moon as well!
I8-D
The US already tried to change the zero point of the longitude system to be centered on Washington DC instead of Greenwich. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_meridian
We have a long tradition of doing the egotistical thing w.r.t. internationally recognized standards.
500 years ago, people weren't reading, they weren't really doing much of anything productive. It wasn't until the Renaissance that things really started humming.
Erm...which renaissance again are we talking about? The one that happened 600-700 years ago or some other renaissance I'm not familiar with.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
The fact that this topic is being used as an excuse to hate on America is an example of all that is wrong with the world. Poor, stupid humans.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Umm, it _is_ Sunday here (New Zealand), and it was Sunday here when you posted your comment (03:30ish). In fact to the first approximation it's _always_ a day later in New Zealand than it is in the US; there is some overlap but how much depends on what part of the US you are in. It's quite possible to fly out of New Zealand late evenint on the Xth of the month, take 12-13 hours in the air, and arrive in the US on the Xth of the month, often mid-morning; I've done it several times. And you lose a day flying back (US -> New Zealand) due to crossing the date line.
Besides which there already is a universal time zone -- UTC (and formerly GMT). Which gets used for all sorts of things where crossing time zones too much gets confusing.
FWIW, ignoring leap seconds for a while doesn't seem a huge problem to me providing we have a leap minute or something after a few decades. Ignoring the problem for a few centuries might be a little problematic but probably still not that much (noon would be a few minutes off).
Ewen
500 years ago, people weren't reading, they weren't really doing much of anything productive.
Yeah, that's why bibles have been around for centuries and people have been writing and reading them - among other things. And the whole discovering new lands thing (Columbus was about 500 years ago)... totally nothing.
Yep. People just sat around. Never invented anything. Just stared at walls waiting for jesus to save them.
So the US refuses to adopt DST, but are prepared to have the time permanently out of step with reality by up to an hour for hundreds of years just to avoid the occasional one second tweak that no one notices? (And on New Years Eve when often several hours can't be accounted for.)
Perhaps they should just disband National Institute of Standards and Technology and let their weights and measures drift too - it'd be quicker than the current approach to adopting the metric system.
BUUURRRN!!!
"However, if there were only one time zone I would have to find out when people work, but after I found out when they work I wouldn't have to do any math to figure out what time that was to me."
Instead, you'd have to write it down, just as you'd essentially have to do with the operating hours of all businesses you deal with, local or remote. You'd be eliminating anything resembling a rule of thumb for business hours.
"I also can't figure out why you think businesses would adjust their schedules to local noon, as opposed to adjusting their clocks to matches the businesses that they work with."
Aside from the human health aspects and the transportation safety aspects (always safer to commute in daylight), there will always be businesses in that network you deal with that rely on available sunlight for whatever reason (agriculture, construction, power generation, etc.), something that has little bearing to any manmade time standard. Because their business depends on where the sun is in the sky and not so much on other businesses, they will ultimately be the ones that dictate when the rest of their community operates.
"Companies with nation interests are already open from 8 AM EST to 5 PM PST, because that when they do business with are open. "
Beyond opening offices across multiple time zones for load bearing (since nobody can be working more than 40 hours a week), nobody actually does that. Either they're open 24/7 (and ultimatley have a skeleton staff around when the sun is down and most customers are asleep), or they tell you to please call within certain operating hours, and the time zone those hours are in.
"The 9-5 standard didn't come out of daylight hours. 9-5 came out of daylight hours, but it became standard because there's a distinict economic advantage to being open at the same time as your business partners. I don't see any reason to think that eliminating time zones would change that."
Because, without standardized time zones with integer hour differences, no two meridians agree on where the sun is in the sky. The earth is round. Time zones allow a synchronized window of operations within the zone where the difference in local solar time is acceptable (within 15 degrees). Without this common frame of reference, there is no good reason for two communities 3 degrees apart to not set their operating hours (even if not their clocks) apart by 12 minutes. This is exactly the situation we had before time zones were introduced, and there is no reason to believe it won't revert to that situation. GMT was alive and well (which is how they knew what meridian they were on), but railroad and telegraph lines required that standardized frames of reference be agreed upon and established across the country, then the world. And you're trying to argue that the same technological and economic advancements that required the establishment of time zones would now magically funtion better in their absence?
You're supposed to adapt your frame of reference to suit your purposes, not the other way around, and the less your clock resembles the world around you and your personal experience, the less you're actually going to use it to define your frame of reference. As the original post was referring to the situation in China, without time zones, somebody would just have to invent them. The history of mechanical time has been a history of trying to make a more perfect sundial, and if you are going to abandon the sundial meme, mechanical timepieces become useless for all practical purporses.
But, again, your hypothesis of an easier life is easily testable: here is International Atomic Time, where each and every hour is exactly 3.6 ks (no leap seconds). Set your watch by it and live by it. See how well it works for you.
Really?
And with timezones, you have to bust out some table and look up the timezone and daylight saving times for the country, or see if anyone remembers what the timezone difference currently is.
Timezones reduce the number of local times to keep track of from infinitely many local solar times to 24 timezones. gladmac was not suggesting to go back to solar time, but to consequently follow down that path: use a single global timezone.
And gladmac has a point here: Nowadays people communicate over timezone borders much more frequently than they actually travel over them. Changing to a global timezone would shift the coordination problems from the "communicators" to the "travellers", and thus create the very same headaches, but for a lot less people.
Of course, the battle over who would be allowed to make their local timezone the global one will be fierce. :-)
You missed the point of that statement. I am saying that I wake up on a Saturday morning and go to bed on a saturday night (arguably sometimes slightly later). The concept of a day includes some sleep, morning, noon, evening, nighttime. A saturday is different from a friday.
What i'm suggesting is that if you woke up at 2pm on Saturday and then went to bed at 10am on Sunday (both in local time, which is then a universal time). Suddenly your 'day' isn't concrete in your mind. Your day doesn't have the order. If you move across the globe, you have to remember new time standards. If you do business around the globe you have to figure out when everyone is in the office.
The concept of a day you take for granted- ask the people who work night shifts how hard it is sometimes. Not to mention if this was the requirement to have disorder as opposed to being sleect cases.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
This is just proof of the prophecies of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs. It is well known that The Conspiracy has been
fucking with the clocks for centuries (look at the shifts they've made in the calendar in centuries past). More proof that the Xists will one day come and rescue those who have paid their $30 for a seat on the escape vessels.
Is it leap forward, or fall back, when a leap second occurs? I always get it wrong, and show up for work to late, or to early.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I haven't thought about this in detail, but I tend to agree with you. My impression is that abolishing the leap second probably won't do much to help any of the highly accurate systems that already have problems, because those systems will just have to reverse the way they're dealing with things.
Astronomy's a good example. Astronomers already have to cope with leap seconds (through concepts like Dynamical time) for calculating things like star and planetary positions in the past and future. Removing leap seconds would keep UT on track with where the planets are, but they'd simply have to correct for leap seconds elsewhere, keeping in mind that if we make time consistent, it doesn't make the Earth consistent. eg. Tasks like keeping Earth-based telescopes correctly aimed would need leap seconds to be subtracted instead of added.
Similarly, any complex system that's related to satellites, the Sun, or anything non-terrestrial, will still have to have a mechanism for converting.
The fact is that there are already at least two perceptions of time, and many more if you decide to look further. You'd hope that any systems that requires so much accuracy would already have been developed by people competent enough to clearly understand the concept of Time. Unless it can be shown that this will be astoundingly useful, I don't think it's worth doing. It'll create even more systems of time, which will lead to even more possible ways to make mistakes.
"Does it really matter if I wake up at 0000 isntead of 0800?"
You'd be doing neither.
Key moments in solar time today:
Dublin, Ireland
53.4 N, 6.3 W
Current time zone: UTC +0
Sunrise: 0438 UTC
Noon: 1231 UTC
Sunset: 2024 UTC
Vancouver, British Columbia
49.3 N, 123.1 W
Current time zone: UTC -8
Sunrise: 1242 UTC
Noon: 2019 UTC
Sunset: 0355 UTC
Solar time, we're not talking about the difference between 0000 and 0800, we're talking about the difference between 0019 and 0831.
Perhaps it would be "more fair" to use the mean solar time instead of actual solar time. In which case, we're talking about the difference betwen 0012 and 0824.
And I'm being kind here: I'm rounding off to integer minutes.
Now, would you rather remember that the time^H^H^H^H difference in the hours of operation betwen Dublin and Vancouver is 7 hours, 47 minutes and 12 seconds, or would you rather have a global standard that lets you say it's exactly 8 hours?
Hey, anyone remember the last bunch of people to mess with the calendar?"
n dars.html
There were plenty of them since Julius Caesar. For example:
At the behest of the Council of Trent, Pope Pius V introduced a new Breviary in 1568 and Missal in 1570, both of which included adjustments to the lunar tables and the leap-year system. Pope Gregory XIII, who succeeded Pope Pius in 1572, soon convened a commission to consider reform of the calendar, since he considered his predecessor's measures inadequate.
The recommendations of Pope Gregory's calendar commission were instituted by the papal bull "Inter Gravissimus," signed on 1582 February 24. Ten days were deleted from the calendar, so that 1582 October 4 was followed by 1582 October 15, thereby causing the vernal equinox of 1583 and subsequent years to occur about March 21.
http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEhelp/cale
Let us take a radical look at the problem.
A master time solution needs to specify 1) a unit for time, 2) the virtual location of the master clock (demanded by relativity), 3) the system of notation, particularly the numberal system, 4) how local times can be conveniently related to the master time, and 5) when to make the transition.
1) There is no compelling reason to use anything else than the metric definition of the second as the unit. It is well imbedded in everyday use, and using the gravitational constant to generate a universal system is not really practical. The gravitational force is too weak and the resulting system would be incommensurate with the existing English and metric systems.
2) If the virtual location is moved to the barycenter of the solar system, and a mean time is used to eliminate the variation in gravitational potential at the barycenter, the gravitational redshift at the earth will make the master time deviate from GMT by only a few hours over the next 10,000 years.
3) If 7! = 1x2x3x4x5x6x7 = 5,040 is used as the base of the the numeral system, we can use the best highly-composite base for people who have invented computers, and get away from the unnatural decimal system. (The natural way for people who have invented the concept of zero to count on their fingers is base-6, with zero represented by the closed fist.) The use of the Hindu-Roman alphanumeric symbols (0-9,a-z) to represent base-36 is a good way to represent the system using standard keyboard characters. (5,040 = 7x24x30 is the best default standard. 5,040 = 7x8x9x10, if using just Hindu numerals.) The metric system should also be superceded, because it creates unnecessary units differing from the atomic ones. Creating new measurement systems for greater convenience is natural for people for have invented calculators to do the necessary conversions during the transition.
By serendipity, the combination of the second and the 7! numeral system gives a near commensurability with the reformed calendar using equal quarters and a leap week every five or six years. Astronomical observations are needed to make the calendar match to tropical years. In about 10,000 years, however, the leap weeks defined by the master time will have made one cycle around the earth's seasons. If more people are living elsewhere than the earth at that time, the interplanetary leap week holiday can then be set using master time, helping eliminate an overly geocentric cultural bias.
4) Now that we have defined a system good for 10,000 years or more, we can concentrate on making computerized timepieces that provide a variety of good local times. Since most people like to rise with the sun, for instance, many people can choose to have their local sunrise always occur at 6am. The resulting slight difference in the rate of time will not be psychologically noticeable, unlike the abrupt hour shifts of Daylight Savings Time.
5) A good epoch zero for setting the rate of the master time and implementing its general use is 2023 December 25 1200 UTC. This Monday is the first day of the last international week before the first Gregorian leap year of this millenium. It minimizes the conflict in dates between the reformed calendar with equal quarters and zero (leap) weeks and the current international (Gregorian)calendar. It is also conveniently far in the future to be able to institute all the time reforms mentioned above.
Adding a single second every few years results in
"overdue hassles and expense" for telecom systems. (BTW if you check out the time systems on your computer or data transmitter, you will find that they already know of all of the leap seconds out to 2050 in most cases.) BUT! adding a full month to daylight savings has no affect at all. *sigh* So goes with Liberal Republicans. Change for the sake of change, damn the logic full steam in every direction at once. (Ironically the word I have to type in to verify is excrete.)
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
... is american imperialism and crusade.
The elimination of leap second would make sextants and sun dials obsolete. That would mean GPS is the only way to find precise location in remote places.
USA wants to invade country X, so they down the civilian GPS signal and the whole world (minus the zionists and the russkies) are at their mercy, because you need to find your whereabout in a war.
Current gps systems work on the assumption that satellite orbits change slightly over time, and corrections to the orbital data are transmitted to the recievers from the satellites themselves, along with a time reference. That time reference takes into account the changing of the earths rotational velocity, so gps recievers assume it's constant.
This change in standard would require now that all gps reciever software get adjustments on earths rotational velocity sent to them, because it's no longer constant. It doesn't matter how you twist it, satellites are moving in an intertial reference frame, earth is rotating at a velocity that changes within that reference frame, the adjustment MUST be made somewhere in the system. This change just means the recievers have to be reprogrammed for a different 'earth model' and then they will work with 'fixed time', and a changing rotational velocity. since that firmware isn't in all the recievers out there, gps recievers will be left as they are, and the time reference transmitted from the gps satellites will continue to be adjusted to account for rotational changes.
If they really want to make this so that the programmers dont have to deal with the issue, re-define lattitude and longitude to be reference the gps satellites instead of reference the earths surface, and this problem goes away. But, as long as the satellites obey physics, and lat/lon lines are fixed in space relative the earths surface, this correction needs to be made, no matter WHAT the politicians say.
Bush and crowd may be able to trump the constitution and laws of the usa, they still cannot trump the laws of physics, no matter how badly they may want to.
Dave Mills, author of the NTP RFC and main implementor of the NTP server software since time immemorial (back in the Fuzzball distro for PDP-11 days) has an extensive collection of information about time and how it relates to networks. Here's a specific page about the leap second:
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/leap.html
For more info, see the NTP site:
http://www.ntp.org/
and the site of the Network Time Synchronization Project:
http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/ntp.html
maybe you should start by dropping that silly am/pm crap. That's confusing enough by itself, but looses all meaning when talking in universal time!
Jesus saved me from my past.
Apparently not.
I believe we should change the year to ten months of 30 days each. It would greatly simplify the math.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
I don't know an awful lot about the subject, but it seems to me, with MOST of the world using metric for other measurements, it's probably about time that we incorporate a metric measurement for time, too. Sure, it'd probably mess a lot of things up initially, but in the long run, wouldn't it be better? Seconds, minutes, and hours are all arbitrary. Years and months are about the only thing that has some basis on reality--and those measurements are KNOWN to be wrong(see leap years)... And besides, we use base 10 for most everything else, currently. What's with this 60/60/24/~30/356 stuff?
The last paragraph of the article expresses the whole basis of the argument rather succinctly, I think.
-h-
"Jesus! How could I have wasted a whole hour?"
Time zones simplifies differences in time between two locations into an integer number of hours, allowing a simple calculation to be done after glancing at a clock set in the local frame of reference.
Time zones aren't quite that simple, there's nothing saying the difference has to be an "integer number of hours" and indeed there are cases where they aren't. However these differences still tend to only be 1/2 an hour so the conversion is still kept relatively simple.
As an example I think the time zone for Mumbai, India is UTC + 5.5
Uh, why do we care exactly how many minutes the sun takes to travel this distance?
When I suggested sunrise to sunset I was simply referring to the tradition of working during daylight hours. Companies would pick an arbitrary starting time and stopping time for each branch, and they would probably tend to round it off. I doubt anybody would open at 0831.
It doesn't need to be nearly as complicated as you make it out to be, and computers have to deal with date changes in the middle of a day all the time. Do you think that Mastercard and Visa have separate databases for each region of Earth? Somehow they manage to mail out statements despite the fact that charges come in at 11:59PM and 12:01AM in a steady stream...
But what would you put into your crontab? You don't want to run your backup-which-slows- the-system-considerably to occur in the middle of the workday, so you would probably set it to some relative time, like "sunrise - 5 hours".
Uh, what do you put in your crontab now? 0300 most likely. A completely arbitrary time that happens to be in the middle of the night.
So pick some time that happens to be in the middle of your night and run your jobs then...
Note that in many enterprise-level servers they don't have the luxury of "night time" - when you run a global business the servers don't go to sleep at night...
For some reason the Navy has been able to use GMT at sea for ages. For some reason it doesn't matter that the sun is rising a 2200 hours...
Instead, you'd have to write it down, just as you'd essentially have to do with the operating hours of all businesses you deal with, local or remote. You'd be eliminating anything resembling a rule of thumb for business hours.
Uh, right now you look up what time zone another business is in and guess when they're open.
Under the proposed system, you look at how many hours away they are, and guess when they're open.
What's the difference?
It isn't like one business is going to open at 1842 and another at 1857. They'd both open at 1900 most likely, or 1800 perhaps. However, in your local neighborhood you could probably find examples of business that open at 7, 8, and 9 AM - so that is hardly anything revoluationary...
I wake up when I hear my wife yelling at the cat in the kitchen!
I get up when I can't "hold it" any more!
I eat breakfast in my car during my drive to work; Tim Hortons Coffee and Bagel!
I eat lunch when my stomach prevents me from concentrating on my work any more!
I eat dinner when I get home from work!
I go to sleep when I can't keep my eyes open anymore!
What is this thing called "time" you people keep talking about?
- No Sig for you!
But then suddenly it leaps to safety!
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
For years now, I thought the Republicans were trying to repeal the 20th century with their opposition to labor laws, environmental laws, public education, etc. Apparently I was wrong. They're trying to repeal the 16th century.
All physics runs on a clock without leap seconds. Relativity makes some clocks run at different rates, but that's a deterministic process that can be accounted for. UTC uses leap seconds because of an archaic desire to tie our clocks to the non-constant, non-deterministic rotation of the Earth.
UTC is not deterministic because we can't predict the rotation of the Earth (becuase it in part depends on things like the weather which we cannot predict to anywhere near the accuracy needed). So leap seconds are added willy-nilly whenever the Earth's rotation changes enough that UTC is 0.9 seconds fast or slow.
But physics needs a deterministic second that doesn't care about what time the Sun rises or sets! We should have a deterministic time system and track the Earth's rotation separately (with UT1) for those special applications that need a precise determination of the Earth's rotation.
Cival time should be the time physics uses... it should be God's time!
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
It doesn't need to be nearly as complicated as you make it out to be, and computers have to deal with date changes in the middle of a day all the time.
Computers have no problem with this, but humans would. The fact that the day would change while most people were wide awake and working would be very confusing. Universal time is fine for computers, and many computers are set to UTC. They really should be set to TAI, which is what you suggest (UTC without the leap seconds). But for humans, it makes more sense to make a day rougly equivalent to the time you wake up and go to sleep. In fact, if you're going to change things, it'd probably be better if we just did away with noon being the high point of the sun, and instead set midnight to somewhere around the middle of the time when people are asleep. It's those couple hours discrepancy which cause the most confusion already anyway ("I'll meet you tonight at 1AM" when you technically mean tomorrow morning).
Assume that most people would be open for their solar day, when it's light out.
If you need to place a call to Zimbabwe now you look up the time, find the offset, and know what time it is there, and you guess if their business will be open at those times. In the new system you'd look up for offset, figure out if you'd be open in X hours, and guess about them based on that. Seems almost identical.
But, it offers a benefit of them being able to say "I work from X to Y" and you knowing what those times are because you work from X2 to Y2, and you can tell when those ranges overlap without doing any math. Then you say "Oh, it's almost Y, I should call the Zimbabwe office." Who cares what the number is?
Really, it's no more of a problem than months. It's summer in Australia when it's winter in North America, and vice versa. This doesn't mean that my Australian friends and I have horrible culture shock when I mention spring break or anything. But, to emulate the currently broken system they'd shift the months and have December when we have June - that way the "Winter" months would always be the same. Of course, whenever you wanted to know the date anywhere you'd need to figure out how many months ahead or behind they were... It'd be a mess.
You're inventing problems that don't exist.
Companies would stay open the same time, relative to the sun, that they're open now, because people like driving in the daylight, etc. Also, there'd be local reference agencies - like everyone keeping the same hours as the local government.
Right now everyone works 9-5 (let's pretend) but my 9am doesn't mean anything in regard to your 9am. If you ask me to call you at 9am I need to know where you live.
If everyone used Swatch Internet time, or whatever, you'd say "Call me at 37:68" or whatever and I'd know EXACTLY what that meant, because it'd be the same time here.
What do I care if you get up at 36:50 and I'm calling in your morning, or if you're in the middle of the day? My syncronization concerns are over the minute you say when to call. If I have to guess I'd figure out your daylight offset and ask myself if I'd be at work at whatever time that would be - if I would, chances are you would.
This whole Chinese timezone thing is a non-issue. Of course, farmers like getting up with the light. That's only a problem if you mandate that farmers worldwide must work at 6am UTC or something. If you let the farmers get up when it's light out, who cares what the numbers are?
Nice research. It means exactly dick, however.
Key words: "after the sun comes up"
How long after? Who knows! The posting didn't specify.
I never suggested that I wake up at sunrise, but merely that I typically wake up after it is no longer dark outside.
If you want to be a pedantic cocksucker, at least read the fucking words.
Thanks!
Kid-proof tablet..
Techies would run into this - we ssh into computers on the other side of the world. But non techies? How often do people set their coffee pots on Swiss time (ignoring the Swiss, for a moment)? They'd know they get up a Foo:Bar O'Clock because they need to be at work at Foo:Bar + 1h.
Moreover, synchronization would be trivial. Global teleconferences could start at one published time, without a time, a zone, and everyone else having to calculate the offset.
Business hours in Maine are already arbitrary. As they are everywhere. Nobody tells my companyt that they must be open between 9-5, they do that because everyone else locally does that. So what if 9-5 in my area was 1-9, or 47:30 to 80:30, or Xlort:7.2 to Jylar:13 after our alien overlords conquer us?
If you want to call a business in Maine you need to calculate the timezone offset (also the "Solar Offset") between you and Maine. You then do the math and figure out what 9-5 in Maine is in your area, and you try to reach them. In a universal system you'd still (for an unsolicited call) look up the solar offset and call them in the middle of their solar day - when most businesses are open.
The big benefit is that if they say "Call at X:Y", you know exactly what time it is in your area, X:Y.
Fine, base it on the time the sun is highest in the sky. Even in 24h darkness that concept has meaning. Go four hours in either direction and you have the equivalent of an 8-4 shift. Was that hard?
Who cares if the sun is highest at 12:00, or 03:30, or whatever? You'd learn your hours the same way anyone learns their work hours - few of my past jobs have actually been 9-5. There was an 8-4, a sunrise-6pm (construction), 7-3 (food service), 10-6... If you wanted to call me at work you'd need to guess, but you could safely assume that the chance was higher when the sun was out. Exactly what it'd be under a universal system.
The difference being that if I said "Call me at Foo:Bar O'Clock you'd call when your watch said that. You wouldn't have to lookup an offset chart to call into the company's international voice conference.
So I assume they don't expect the first leap-hour to be in their lifetimes. It'll make life easier for us - and everyone in the next few generations, and push the problem onto future programmers.
As if anyone is going to write leap-hour ready code except within 10 years to the first leap-hour.
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History repeating itself - one hour at a time
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.
Leap seconds are necessary to keep time standards synchronized with civil calendars, the basis of which is astronomical.
http://DiabloHeat.com | http://Kyle.TheOCSucks.com | http://TheOCSucks.com
The US should have just suggested to destroy the moon. Sure, it would stop the tidal actions that our environment depends on, but it would make our IT systems safer until then.
(Or Hollywood can take down that scenery prop. They only put it up there to make the "moon landing" more convincing.)
Calendar systems are a big deal. And it is important that they be accurate.
We introduced leap years for a reason. The Julian calendar was out of step with the seasons and causing real problems in the interaction between farmers, their customers and their governments. For example, in some times farmers would be taxed before they actually harvested their crops.
We have evolved systems to keep the wheels of our society and economy moving.
We introduced leap seconds for a reason. Users of atomic clocks (the US miltary with missile guidance systems and ummm the Naval Observatory for example) found that the calendar wasn't working.
And these guys want to go back 500 years??? To undo things that work well? And are well understood by the people affected?
Why?
Could there be a hidden agenda here? "Hell, GPS selective availability was turned off during Gulf War 1, and we haven't been able to turn it back on. How are we going to get back our advantage? I know! Why don't we stuff up the calendar. Other people will get stuck with lousy accuracy and we can keep our own clocks"
Civilian GPS is subvertable, because the datastream is not signed. anyone with the right hardware can become a new GPS base station ...that would be a fun exercise for a hacker convention.
But there is one thing GPS does do, and that is omit leap seconds from its clock. There are no leap seconds in its time sequence. instead, the time signals include data on the current offset from WGS-84 time to UTC time. This causes all receivers to display UTC time to users, while remaining accurate internally. It also makes it easy to propagate changes round the world, just by changing the offset value.
One thing I dont know is what happens if a (subverted) GPS unit were to send out a big offset, like +3600 seconds, or maybe just gradually increase the offset over a few days. This may let you subvert the clock of a computer that drew its time off a GPS receiver, which could be the prelude to some other attack.
> What I don't understand, ... why is it so difficult ?
One reason: arrogance!
Both sides are correct: Astronomers and others running systems that need precise synchronization with the sun (or actually with the rotation of the earth) need the existing time system (or perhaps a better one...) Everyone else doesn't, and is better of with a system that is off sync by a few minutes every century and is easier to maintain. There is absolutely no need that all the people maintaining computers for any purpose have to use a complicated system of measuring time that is only needed by astronomers or operators of spacecraft (that seem not to be able to keep their foam in place nowadays...)
The argument is stupid because there is absolutely no reason why two systems representing time cannot co-exist, with precise conversion functions where necessary. Astronomers would sync their telescopes using "Time PRO(TM)" and write their papers an a PC synced to NIST and displaying time using "Time HOME(TM)". Where's the problem. Overall costs would be lower because almost all software and hardware around the world has no need for the complication of syncing with earth rotation to within a second. reliability of time-critic software/hardware would be better because whoever makes them would have to learn more about what time is and not take it for granted. And finally: freeing precise time protocols from the need to be usable by beaurocrats all around the world would probably result later in a protocol that syncs time with earth movement much more often than a second every few years (how about a thousands of a second every few hours, and how about a time representation that divides an earth day to exactly a million equal parts? would be much more practical for controling telescopes or spaceships or sattelites).
The Jewish callendar has 12 months totaling 354 days, so it's not in sync with the solarn year. Every 2 or 3 years a leap month is added. It used to be done ad-hoc by a body similar to NIST. But about 2 millenia ago the system changed by fixing a 19 year cycle. The Muslim calendar is the same without leap months, so every solar year it gains 11 days over the solar calendar, and it cycles every 365/11 solar years. So Muslim holidays are not in sync with the seasons, and muslims celebrating Ramadan in the summer can discuss how it was different when they were children and celebrated it in the winter. There is no problem with all those calendars coexisting, and there are precise functions for converting dates from one calendar to another.
I don't see any problem. I think the US proposition will be adopted in some form without making the old time keeping system go away, the two time systems will coexist, and eventually those who really "need" the old system would devise a new and better system for their needs that doesn't have to make compromises for ease of use by others who don't need it.
Actually, the last large calendar reform I am aware of was the French Republican Calendar in the XVIIIth century.
It adopted some very interesting ideas, like:
- The use of a 12 30-day month year, followed by an end of year festival of 5 or 6-days, so that months had identical lengths.
- A 10 day week, so that each month had an integer number of weeks and each day of the week fell always on the same day of the month.
- Month names were changed to reflect the seasons, and each set of three months had rhyming terminations so that you could identify the season from the month name.
In all a very cool but also very different calendar, which was quickly abandoned 12 years later when Napoleon overthrew the republic.
Lots of info on the Internet in sites like this one:
http://www.eskimo.com/~lisanne/frenchrep.htm
But the fact of the matter is WE ARE NEVER (or VERY RARELY) in 100% alignment. It's not like the moon tugs us out of alignment at 1-second intervals. It's a fraction here, a fraction there. So even when we adjust with a leap second, we are out of alignment almost IMMEDIATELY (by a fraction of a second).
The two questions we need to be asking are:
- How far out of alignment are we willing to be? (Astronomers say one second is too much, the US proposal says up to an hour out of alignment is fine)
- How frequently do we want to change our measurement system, given that it's a major hassle to change it? (Many Astronomers say every few years, US Proposal says every 500 years is better).
That's what it boils down to. Personally, I think that fewer changes are better - adding leap seconds every few years, while entertaining and giving us something to talk about, is a mistake. I like the proposal.
No matter what, if you are looking for precision in measurement (as the astronomers are doing), you need to adjust from measured time and actual astronomical positioning. It's actually HARDER if both scales are adjusting regularly (even if you are adjusting one to be equal to the other for a moment every three or four years). Let one vary (the one we can't change), and keep our measurement system fairly constant!
How's this for an analogy: The foot was originally defined as the length of King Henry I's foot. Do you want to change the definition of this unit of measure throughout the day, as his foot grows and shrinks? Do you want to change it every time we have a new King? Or do you just say the new king's "foot" measures to "0.97 foot". We can't change the fact that the King's foot changes size throughout the day, and over time with new kings. But we CAN change (or keep constant) what our measurement system defines as a foot! I doubt that many people would advocate dynamic distance measurement based on how the king's foot swells ("The King has gout! Therefore my 200 foot x 400 foot property just got bigger! YAHOO!")
Quit messin' with it!
Most Unix systems now do use TAI as their time base (except with an epoch of 1 JAN 1970) - the correction for leap seconds is done using the timezone files, leap seconds don't modify the clock value.
For myself, I've never had a problem with figuring out what day it was, even though I'm usually up at midnight. Do it like baseball - you call the day based on when it started when referring to "whole days", otherwise just use whatever the current time stamp shows. So what if "Saturday night" is technically Sunday morning?
But if you travel across 12 time zones, waking up at 8 AM local time will be very confusing anyway! And if you travel from northern Scandinavia to New Zealand on June 22nd, you'll be very confused about how the sun is acting.
Lalala
You hit the nail on the head with the normal people thing. The problem is that we've been thinking in terms of a single time standard when what we really need are multiple standards. Set a scientific standard based on the atomic clocks then everybody has a base time to work with. No leap seconds/hours/days/years to worry about at all with this one. (Which would accomplish what I suspect the politicians are shooting for; They want to abolish the need to worry about it for a long time.)
With one standard in place, we can then create other standards based on it such as an astronomical time which could take into account leap seconds as necessary but without requiring everybody else to conform to it. Your astrological time could be Scientific Time + 3 seconds for example, which would be easy enough for software and people to work around. It would allow those that need it to continue to use the current time scheme without worry of changing standards.
Now for biological clocks we would probably need to sub-divide into sunlight and human centric time standards. We would have a day based on where the sun stands (expressed as Scientific Standard, plus or minus however many seconds (and expressed as a sundial wristwatch.. maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here.) The human centric one would be based on a day of 24 hours and 11 minutes (the biological standard) and that would do away with all the little irritations of daylight saving time or no saving depending on where you are.)
Plus it would mean that there would be a need for new technology which would in turn produce more jobs but the new tech would affect almost solely end consumers which means no necessity to muck about with aging comptuer programs and systems.
The biggest benefit by far would be to me, who would get to sleep in for eleven extra minutes every morning.
Then again, we could just not muck about with the system everybody is used to.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Most Unix systems now do use TAI as their time base (except with an epoch of 1 JAN 1970) - the correction for leap seconds is done using the timezone files, leap seconds don't modify the clock value.
Any system which does this isn't a Unix® system. The POSIX standard is to use UTC, not TAI. I think you're wrong with regard to what most unixlike operating systems use, too. Do you have any cite to back up your claim?
For myself, I've never had a problem with figuring out what day it was, even though I'm usually up at midnight. Do it like baseball - you call the day based on when it started when referring to "whole days", otherwise just use whatever the current time stamp shows.
So if the date changes at the peak of the sun, and I tell you "let's have lunch Wednesday", what day am I referring to?
While we're at it, let's either change 12:00 to 0:00 or change the date at 1 AM. That's another big source of confusion.
How should general purpose computers represent timestamps?
Having leap seconds is like making timezones with 1-second granulation instead of the current 1-hour.
Wow, 555 comments and still no one has pointed out that the author of the article is the same guy who created qrpff and LAMP?
1/20 != 5/60, there going to be more like 3 and 7 minute blocks than 5 or 10 minute blocks after currency exchange.
"It isn't like one business is going to open at 1842 and another at 1857. They'd both open at 1900 most likely, or 1800 perhaps."
Why? What compelling reason is there to do so?
Ultimately, in our lives there are two standards of time, one atomic, one solar, and solar always has preference. Atomic clocks do not govern how much heat and light you get from the sky, how much longer farm workers can harvest in the field, how much longer construction workers can erect a skyscraper, how much load is put on the electric grid by air conditioners, driving conditions or any number of other factors. Atomic time, by itself, is a wholly arbitrary number, and knowing what time it is in TAI or even UTC has about as much meaning to most of the population as knowing what Julian Day it is.
We have time zones so that we can use atomic time in a way that is acceptably close to solar time. Generally speaking, time zones keep the arbitrary, otherwise meaningless numbers presented by a clock reasonably close to what a sundial would say. This deviation is relatively small, and looking at a clock becomes an acceptable substitute to looking out a window.
Without time zones, without some sort of agreement between atomic time and solar time, you now have a situation where, instead of atomic time is trying to complement solar time, it is trying to compete with solar time, and history has shown that it will lose every time.
You mention that businesses could choose to open at an integer number of hours offset from TAI. But which direction? What about communities that are 7.5 degrees west longitude, should they round up or round down an integer hour? Worse yet, what compelling reason is there for all businesses on that meridian to all round in the same direction? Some will round up, some will round down, and it will generate disagreement along that meridian.
On the other hand, one thing that everybody on that meridian can agree upon is where the sun is in the sky. Modern sundials can compensate for the equation of time, modern sundials can work on cloudy days, and modern sundials can even have a digital display. A sundial can tell you how many SI hours you are from local noon, or mean noon, or any number of measurements that depend on where the sun is in the sky. If you want your clock or your watch to be an adequate substitute to looking out the window, instead of setting it to TAI you will set it to a sundial.
This is what happened in the Eighteenth Century. The concept of a global time, GMT, had been around for about a century beforehand. A new town's location on the map was determined by GMT, so a town's builders were well aware of how much time they were behind GMT. However, when it became time to decide on a community's standard of time, there was no compelling reason to try to use GMT. A chronometer told you nothing about the amount of heat and light you get from the sky, when you could work outside, or when to start lighting the gas lamps. There was also no compelling reason to try to offset their lives by an integer number of hours from GMT, because such a decision was wholly arbitrary and would be ad hoc across the country (even if everybody decided to offset from GMT, there'd be no agreement on which direction to round).
So, almost without exception, the decision was made instead to set clocks and watches based on a sundial. And without time zones, you are removing one of the main reasons (if not the only reason) to use atomic time as the standard in your life instead of solar time.
If you are a business owner, with anything even resembling local interests (often in the form of "getting employees to show up"), and you have to choose between operating based on some arbitrary numbers that represent only themselves, or based on a particular shadow, why should you choose the former? Not everybody in a community (let alone a state) would be able to agree on exactly what window in TAI to live their waking lives, but the sun in the sky provides an undeniable tim
"How long after? Who knows! The posting didn't specify."
Your employer will. What benefit is there for the general population to live their lives based on TAI instead of based on a sundial?
"but merely that I typically wake up after it is no longer dark outside."
TAI, at best, tells you when it is light outisde on the Prime Meridian. If you are going to live your life based on where the sun is in the sky anyway, why would you bother with atomic time to begin with, especially if you no longer try to adjust atomic time to agree with solar time?
"Companies would stay open the same time, relative to the sun, that they're open now,"
Why? If atomic time and solar time no longer try to agree with one another, why would a company base its hours off of atomic time instead of solar time? If they're going to operate "relative to the sun," and atomic time is no longer relative to the sun, why would they continue to use it?
"Also, there'd be local reference agencies - like everyone keeping the same hours as the local government."
We already have the situation in two states where, during Daylight Saving Time, the clocks in the post offices are an hour off from clocks everywhere else in the county (including county courthouses). And if government timekeepers aren't a compelling reason to abide by a standard that tries to follow the sun, why would the local populace abide by a standard that has nothing to do with the sun? What compelling reason would there be not to use a sundial?
""Call me at 37:68" or whatever and I'd know EXACTLY what that meant, because it'd be the same time here."
Already more than possible using UTC. Any plan for a compulsory global time zone would have to take into account the fact that nobody is doing it voluntarily.
"My syncronization concerns are over the minute you say when to call."
What if there is no pre-arranged synchronization? What if you want to suprise me on my birthday and call me during lunch?
"That's only a problem if you mandate that farmers worldwide must work at 6am UTC or something."
But trying to compel a single worldwide timezone is already an attempt to get everybody else to comply with UTC, if only on the defintion of hours. Without an agreed-upon standard of how to adjust lives with respect to UTC, lining up your hours with UTC only makes sense in communities lying on longitude lines that are multiples of 15. Noon in New Orleans tends to line up conveniently with x:00 UTC, but noon in Houston does not. And if modern things like elctricity demand depend more on solar noon than when an even 3.6 ks goes by in UTC, what compelling reason is there to use UTC to begin with?
Today, that compelling reason is time zones, an agreed-upon standard that tries to adjust UTC to agree with solar time without complicated mathematics. New Orleans, Houston and Chicago can agree to synchronize their mechanical clocks becaues they are not also trying to synchronize their clocks with New York or Honolulu, and I can publish a table that says "air conditioning needs tend to peak around 12:00" and have it be true for the entire country, because the sun will be overhead at 12:00, give or take 8 degrees.
Without the flexibility of time zones to follow the sun in an agreeable, easy-to-implement way, that same table will start to talk about "solar noon" and your local power plant will suddenly be much more interested in sundials than in atomic timekeepers. The tendancy would be to let the computers worry about the difference between local solar time and UTC (just as we already let the computers worry about the difference between, say, EDT and UTC) and the general populace would live their lives in solar time, making life in Houston off-kilter with life in New Orleans by about 20 minutes.
Why would life after time zones be different from life before time zones?
Sailors don't navigate with the stars anymore? I've seen hundreds of navigation maps that say "DO NOT RELY ON ONE SOUL METHOD OF NAVIGATION." GPS maybe one method I can always use, then a compass and stars could be another.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Regarding your last point, there is no 12:00 AM or 12:00 PM. It is correctly referred to as "noon" or "midnight". That doesn't solve the ambiguity of whether a day specified with "midnight" means the beginning or end of that day.
From the BSD man page for time2posix (3):
I think this is from the same package that is used for the timezone package usually installed on Linux systems.So you're right that doing it that way makes it non-POSIX-compliant, but except for programs that divide the value returned by time() by 86400 to determine the number of days and time of day instead of calling the library routines, it appears that it shouldn't be a big deal to do it that way.
I don't have the sources to the timezone files, and it looks like the Mac zone files don't have leap second support in them, so I can't really easily play around with this at the moment (it's a pain that the GNU date command doesn't have a simple way to enter a time value and convert it to a date string - BSD date command has a -r option, but for GNU that means to use the date of a file).
To the best of my knowledge, the last bunch were the French after the revolution. The correct Wikipedia link for this would have been:
l endar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Ca
Unlike the friendly SI measurements that most non-USians use today, the changes made to the calendar were reverted. Read all about it in Wikipedia.
Actually, there is evidence from around 1,000 years ago that people were not only reading, but also writing (and not only the nobility):
Birch bark documentDon't be so quick to dismiss... :-)
To me the fact that this proposal was submitted in secret seems more worrisome than whether we jigger the clock by a second or by an hour. Normally I would expect my democratic government to be quite open about something as public as timekeeping. Indeed, this seems like a subject on which popular comment would be welcome, even solicited. Bush's favorite line about national security and the "Battle Against Extremism" (or whatever) hardly seems applicable here. So what's up?
One is a day. The other is a Year. It's logical to have some unit of time be equal to the time between one mid-day and the next mid-day. Same goes for the distance from one mid-summer to the next mid-summer.
I'm aware that both of these "natural constants" aren't really constant, but rather change over time as the rotation of the earth and earths distance to the sun is changes. But they're close to constant with the sort of precision that matters to everyday people doing everyday things.
All the rest is arbitrary. There's no reason a year is divided in exactly 12 months, or that there's 7 days in a week, or that there's 24 hours in a day or 60 minutes in an hour.
Actually there are alot of natural time periods.
They are the year, the day, the half day (the part where there is light), the length of the lunar cycle, the time between the longest and shortest days, the time between the longest and the average day, the time between the first and last freeze of a year, the time it takes a human baby to gestate, the time between planting crops and harvesting them, etc etc. Some of these vary a little, but many don't, and all are very important to people without modern technology.
Now, it was arbitrary that the babelonians picked 60 to be the base of their counting system, thus leading to the 60's with regard to time. However, 60 is a convienient way to break things up.
What number of divisions would let us evenly take a twelth, a sixth, a quarter, a third, a half? If we just take 2*2*3 we get 12, so there is the 12 hour day. If we multiply that by 5 we get 60, and thus we can also take a fifth of an hour or minute evenly.
To recap, the 12 hours in a day let us break the day up into alot of different sizes while avoiding fractions, and the 60 minute hour and 60 second minute let us do the same but more so.
This is less important to us since we can use calculators, but to someone who just wants you to spend ~a third of a day working in this field, and a third in that one it is easier to just say "spend 4 hours in each" than to try to figure out the fractions, especially since when this was devised fractions were poorly understood.
In other words, it is nice to have 5,10,15,20,and 30 minutes be nice fractions of a full hour and still be whole minutes. (respectively 1/12, 1/6, 1/4, 1/3, 1/2), 1/5 of an hour isn't used much, probably because of hour bias towards base 10 with 10 being almost 12 anyway.
I was more thinking of *current* cycles that any usable time-system would need to adapt to though, not so much historical.
The Moon *has* a more-or-less steady cycle, but I would argue that to modern man it is not very important, if you ask a random person what moonface is today, or when next fullmoon is, they're unlikely to even know.
Same goes for the other examples you give.
As for 24 and 60 being easily dividible in a lot of ways (60 can be divided in 2,3,4,5,6,10,15,20 and 30 parts) this is true, but I am fairly sure the simple frmer with no knowledge of fractions wanting to divide his 12 hours of light evenly between 3 fields wouldn't have a watch anyway. If he was very lucky his village could have a big clock I guess. He'd be more likely to go by the movement of the sun than anything else.
That's not *so* ancient. In Norway (where I come from) there's lots of mountains with names like "dinner-mountain", named so because as viewed from some nearby village, it'd be dinnertime when the sun was directly above it.
Also, if the thing with divisibility was so important, that'd be a bloody good argument against weeks with 7 days and months with 31 days.
You don't need to split a week or month, you can just specify a whole number of days. Do you see how this makes sense? You only need something to be easily divisible if there isn't a natural smaller unit you can just use multiples of.
So instead of saying some fraction of a month, you can just say "5 days" or whatever. If you want to specify a part of a day, how do you do it? Either you say "1/3 day" or you say 4 hours. Now, at one point the length of an hour was longer or shorter depending on what season it was. An hour was literally 1/12 of a day.
The issue isn't if there's a smaller unit you can just use multiplies of, sure there is, in both cases. Instead of 1/7 week you just say day. And instead of 1/12 day you say hour, so what ?
Point is, there /isn't/ a half week, not as an integer number of days anyway. Nor 1/3 or 1/4 or any other fraction of a week (since 7 is prime).
On the other hand we're repeatedly told that the fact that 12,24 and 60 are easily dividible is a large advantage for their use in timekeeping. There *is* a simple half-hour, 1/4 hour, 1/5 and 1/6 hour. We're told this is an advantage, but at the same time the fact that the 31day month and the 7day week doesn't have any of these is *not* a disadvantage.
I say it is. A month with an *integer* number of weeks in it would have obvious benefits.
You TOTALLY miss the point here.
A week doesn't need to be split up, it already has convienient units which make it up. It is obvious that you split a week up into days.
what isn't obvious is how to split up a day. There is no reason to pick 12 hours instead of 60 hours, except convienience.
Now look at a week. Suppose we split what we now call a 'week' into 6 units, call each unit a dayX. Notice that a dayX is 1 and 1/6 of a day. This is a shitty unit of time because every dayX starts at a different moment of our earths rotation relative to the last. Thus it is clear that any set of days should be grouped into a number of days, and not arbitrarily divided.
You can't say that about a day, it can be divided any number of ways, none of which are rediculous. We could have 10 hours per day (20 per day + night) and get along fine, or we could have 10 hours per rotation of the earth, and get along fine. 12 hours per day is just convienient and historically has inertia.
Yes, it is obvious that a week split into days. Days are natural units.
What's *not* obvious is that it makes sense to combine precisely *7* days into the next-larger unit. And then we pack something like 4.3 of these units ("weeks") into the next larger unit.
7 days in a week is equally arbitrary as 24 hours in a day. And according to one argument you hear in favour of 12-24-60 (ease of division) 7 is a distinctly bad choise. As are 31.
Listen, I didn't say weeks had 7 days for any reason. As it happens, it is probably just because 7 days is a convienient amount of time if you want to do something periodically. So you can have church once a week, and that seems about right. Twice a week and you don't have anything new to talk about, once every two weeks and you forget stuff from the beginning of the period.
At least that is how it seems. I know that I am about through with work by the time the weekend comes along, and it is just barely long enough that I don't bite people on monday morning.