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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?
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.
I say we adjust the planet's rotation and orbit so we have perfect intervals.
Section 8, Clause 5: To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures
Time is a measure, therefore they actually do thave the authority to regulate it.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
So instead of letting private companies eventually wise up and write their software to take into account/be able to deal with leap seconds, let's fuck with the entire way we measure time on a global scale. Way to go government.
Resetting the clock is not complicated, but the current system means there is a 61st second in a minute, as your quote of TFA mentions. People -- including software developers -- are strongly used to dealing with 60-second minutes, and software sometimes makes that assumption. It just requires attention (sometimes a lot of attention) and extra code (sometimes a lot of extra code) to get it right, but since very few people pay attention when a leap second happens, bugs are easily overlooked.
Since leap seconds are based on changes in the time period of Earth's rotation (the sidereal day), and the decay is both very slow and influenced by hard-to-predict factors, leap seconds are not reliably predictable. They can only be announced when they are necessary -- and so it is easy for the displayed time to drift if a leap second announcement is missed or ignored.
Leap hours, though, are different beasts. Virtually every piece of software in the world that displays time knows how to deal with the hour jumping forward or backward. That transition happens predictably and affects a huge number of users, so errors are easily noted.
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