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U.S. Scientists Call for a Time Change
saqmaster writes "The BBC reported yesterday that U.S. scientists want to change the current system which keeps clocks in sync with solar time by adding a leap second every 18 months or so. This has rattled a few cages with the scientists and operators involved in GMT-related projects and facilities as it would effectively remove the importance of the meridian from timing. "
Got lost in a time warp?
No, really, it is about time.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Dude ... your ignorance is showing.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
From the article:"They want for the first time in history to separate us from the natural rotation of the Earth, which means as the years go by we will increasingly get out of sync with astronomy and the real world,"
In other news, residents of Kansas experienced a timeshift, time going back to 1213 AD.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Just call it stardate, everyone will love it. Well, everyone here, anyway.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
And what about switching to the metric system.
So, if the International Telecommunications group wants to run on their own time, what's wrong with that? Astronomers need more advanced/sync'ed clocks and would keep having them. Splitting the two doesn't seem to make much of a difference atleast to the average citizen. We don't add in "leap" seconds into our clocks at home. Day Light Savings seemed like a bigger issue.
Well it might be Intelligent Design.
Since this is a "world" resource, time should no longer be managed by the UK, but by the UN standards body. Surely this will be a much more equitable and fair solution than hogging all of the world's time by one nation.
(Near as I can tell, it's either a tit for tat for the internet thing, or Verizon and SBC have ponied up some big lobbyist dollars to save themselves a few seconds of headache every few years (ha) )
This post brought to you from the Kansas Board of Edumacation.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Thus we see yet another example of the mainstream democrat in his natural environment.
Not only is this a dupe but the consummate trollish stupidity of the first submission set a high-water mark that seems almost sacriligious to challenge!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
What do daffodils do?
Why not just forget about time zones, day light savings and create a new universal global time. So what if it makes my 8am-5pm job change to 1am-9am or if it means I eat lunch during the night. It just seems like we are slowly outgrowing the need for this, as many people work normal hours that used to be considered odd (such as graveyard shifts)
Ave Molech Setting
On either side of the issue. The article wasn't exactly informative, but it would seem to me that most people don't care, and those that do have an emotional investment in the problem.
The article *did* highlight some reasons why the clock should be kept the way it is ( and for the record, I'm all for leaving shit alone when it's working ), but the reasoning wasn't sound. They were saying they need to know the exact time measurements were taken on the other side of the world. Why wouldn't you have that with the new system? It's just silly.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
A WHOLE EXTRA SECOND EVERY 18 MONTHS, I can do SO much in a second, like, wow, get about 2 extra keystrokes in to a Slashdot comment! This is so exciting, but seriously, this is news? Am I just crazy or does this have a significant importance on my M$ bashing life?
next year, I'm all for it!
Dave
But if you read on, the idea does seem quite daft. They want to abolish leap seconds because recalibrating their clocks is a pain in the ass and keeping accurate track of time over long periods is complicated by leap seconds. But the proposal would mean that clock-time will gradually drift so midday will no longer be when the sun is overhead. Altering the basis of timekeeping for the minor convenience of scientists does seem ridiculous.
The US scientists want to REMOVE the extra second because they're sick of resetting their clocks. I hope they don't succeed!
As I was walking down the street one day
A man came up to me and asked me what the time was that was
on my watch, yeah
And I said
Does anybody really know what time it is
I don't
So should I buy a new watch then?
Kaetemi
Don't be silly, everyone knows the metric system doesn't exist.
Quote: "It's going to be thousands of years before such a thing would apply anyway and to allow yourself to get to the stage where you're a whole hour out of synchronisation with the Sun seems to be mad."
Heh, over-obsessed scientist calling another one mad.
Certainly Earth is not going to crash into the Sun if the thing on my wrist is showing 11 instead of 10.
Is it just me or is the fact that they waited until four paragraphs from the end of the entire article to actually state what the change proposal was? They have this massive amount of build up and talk to discord, but I read most of the article wondering, "err, I wish I knew what the proposal was so I can put this whole thing in context".
What the US scientists are suggesting is that we ignore the earth's rotation in our time-keeping, and just try to keep roughly in synch by arbitrarily adding leap-seconds (as opposed to adding them based on our actual observation of the slowing of the earth's rotation). i.e.: Noon will be when your shiny digital watch says it is, not when the sun is precisely above the prime meridian (or precisely X.X hours plus or minus from said event, depending on your timezone).
Dumb, dumb summary... the UK is defending the idea that humans (of both the blow-joe and the astronomical sort) base their sense of time on the earth's rotation... and so our method of time-keeping should do so as well.
God... what a dumb summary...
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
...is clearly out of step with the natural aspirations of the rest of the world. What if they were to use that control for evil purposes? I think the UN should wrest control of the "top-level meridian" from those monopolists in the UK forthwith!
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This seems in the same vein as the ICANN/Root Servers debate. Who controls things like this in an ever more connected world. My view is if it isn't broken why mess with it?
From the article it seems like the leap second is annoying but the leap hour is too much and not frequent enough. If it really that much trouble to keep resetting high precision clocks then why not compromise at leap 10 seconds or some other standard.
The only semi-compelling argument that I can think of is that solar time might be more stable -- the rate of change of the Earth's rotation rate isn't a constant (varies during the year and solar cycle) so the Earth-time leap second process occurs with some irregularity.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
UTC or coordinated universal time (UTC is the acronym that was agreed on because the british and the french had a disagremment about the word order)is the standard time for the world. a time zone is 15 degress of longitude, and is equal to 1 hour. thus if you know the local time, and have a 0 point (Grenwich meridian) and can do some math, you know where on the planet you are.
UTC was agreed upon by an international body, many many years ago. it is now frowned upon to call it gmt (though pretty much everyone does)Not everyone follows it, and their are many variations (Newfoundland time - 30 minutes off)
some countries still have their own meridians.
time is tied to geography.
of inches you measure Americnas but of worlds peeples uses teh metrics! why so rivers apart walk? teh timexes are two inches for now?!
"Let's do the time warp again!" It's not that big a deal people. It's just a jump to your left...
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
Not to mention the issues DST adds to computers and all other equipment that keeps or reads automated logs... so who needs yet other kludge that adds further skews which make data points seem weird where in fact, the time scale itself really is the culprit which goes "non-linear" (i.e., "nuts") every now and then.
Suffering from an insignificance complex are ya..
... really know where time is?
I mean, the old joke - God invented war to teach 'Murricans geography.
Maybe God ought to invent 'brains'...
I don't think it has enough benefits to outweigh the negative implications.
Time to buy a new watch if this goes into effect!
They will... but it'll be one second at a time.
In the mean time (pun intended), I seem to recall from other stories that the US proposal was to stop having a leap second every year and a half or so and have something like a leap minute every century.
As far as precision measurements go: How does adding a second to your clock in the middle of a precision measurement help the supposed measurement?
Instead of focusing on the real problem, which is that the US is wasting time resources, this solution is just trying to patch on to it by adding extra seconds every so often. If we solved the real problem, which is fat greedy Americans, the rest of the world wouldn't even need to add seconds. Yet again the Bush administration shows that they only care for greedy US corporations and will willingly try and screw the rest of the world and the US in order to serve them.
Mmmm.. Donuts
It'd be much better to add TWO leap seconds every 36 months (that is 3 years). Or (insert some fractional number here) every 4 years, so that it gets done along with the leap year period.
You don't really expect users to start adding seconds to their digital clocks every N months, do you?
... we actually *do* have weapons of mass destruction.
Just in case you were thinking about going it alone when you fail to convince the UN, or place us in the "axis of evil" for your war on a noun.
Which Scientists are saying this? The ones with the guns to their head?
Tell me how to make a withdrawal from Daylight Savings and they can have a few seconds from me and put them whereever they like ;)
:(
I'll worry about it when my $2000 computer comes close to keeping time as good as my $2 watch
There's already a timescale called TAI which is just UTC without the leap seconds.
UTC was designed to be a compromise -- the leap seconds keep it within 0.9 seconds of UT1 (a rotational timescale), and it always differs from TAI by an integer number of seconds. Anyone who wants a purely monotonic timescale can use TAI.
Takes some getting used to, but when you are traveling across that country by train, it is *mighty* convenient
That the perjorative of "US Scientists" is applied whole cloth, when in fact the "scientists" in question are limited to the telecommunications industry.
But my absolute favorite passage was:
"and to allow yourself to get to the stage where you're a whole hour out of synchronisation with the Sun seems to be mad. Why can't we just leave things the way they are?"
US non-scientists, in conjuction with the FRENCH, have been doing this for well over a century, and seem to be just fine. And lest we forget, the English drug their heels on adopting the Gregorian calendar for 170 years, resulting in an inaccuracy of 11 days.
Stonehenge, however, keeps perfect "time" no matter how slowly the earth moves. My solution? Lighten the load. Let's have fewer Englishmen.
And what about switching to the metric system.
Go ahead. Don't let me stop you. Just don't be telling me it's 10 degrees centigrade outside.
See, that's one of the places where the metric system advocates got it wrong. Doing silly stuff like trying to get Americans to use degrees centigrade. WTF? It's not like the average citizen was going to be doing mathematical calculations based on the ambient air temperature. He just wants to know what it's LIKE outside, and telling him it was all going to switch, for no good reason, was idiotic and counterproductive.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
I heard a rumor that if war should break out, England would secretly move Greenwich in order to throw everybody's clocks off except theirs.
The WCAA (Wall Clock Association of America) is also requesting that time be also encrypted under the new changes. This will ensure that only users with legally obtained wall clocks will be able to tell the time.
This was horribly written article. Even after reading the whole thing I'm not entirely sure what the proposal is. Although from what I can tell, the submitter got it backwards. The US scientists want to get rid of the leap seconds, not add new ones.
I personally don't see why there is a need to change any of the existing standards - especially the one used by everyday people. The best thing about standards, is that there are so many to choose from. If there was ever a feild where that statement was true, it is the precise time-keeping industry. GPS time is slightly different from UTC time which is different from TAI time, and UT0 and UT1 and Sidereal Time. There are so many different ways to deal with time, and adding a new and improved method never obsoletes the old ones, it just adds yet another standard to the list of time standards that you will have to convert between.
WHY!!! Why advance your time-scale and leave your core units system the same for so long when everywhere else has already upgraded theirs? The imperial system is silly - dividing by 778ft-lb for Btus, 32.2 lf-ft/s2... i dont even remember how many feet there are in a mile... so many didiculous arbitrary units its just.. AUGGH!
And yet they want to improve their time-scale to help scientists. Why? Because it helps some people and doesnt cost industry much? I guess the US is all for improvements as long as it doesnt cost companies money.
I think we should just say "screw-em" and make a scientific time-scale, with its own keeper-machines and clocks, etc. Then we can just use that with the Metric system, and convert over for final values. We have enough to worry about without messy unit conversions.
How should this affect my New Year's countdown?
We don't add in "leap" seconds into our clocks at home.
Yes we do. There will be one this year. The hourly 'pips' on BBC radio will get an extra pip at 2006-01-01 00:00:00.
--
You can listen to this on WWV/WWVH on 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20MHz
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
absolutly nothing.
Intead of saying, it 8:00 here, what time is it in Hong Kong.
You would say "We get to work at 1:pm, what time to people in hong kong go to work??"
thus still doing the same math.
And if you propose everyone works 8 to 5 GMT, well then what about schools? you seriouslt purpose children get up and go to school during the night? That would realy screw up there natural rythem. Propbably see some interesting psychoatic effects.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
An alternative way of living:
- More Sleep time
- More Fun time
- Less time spend travelling to work
- More productive working time
http://www.dbeat.com/28
Regards
EarthGecko
to allow yourself to get to the stage where you're a whole hour out of synchronisation with the Sun seems to be mad.
And yet we do so 6 months out of the year, and starting in 2007 we'll do it for even longer.
Seriously, though, at least when we switch to daylight saving time (or summer time as they call it across the pond) the offset is easy to account for.
You give us control over the root DNS servers, we give you a second every 18 months. And while we're at it, why don't we define Pi to be 3? It would make things so much easier.
I am writing this from Exeter in the south west UK, 300 yards away from me is Exeter St Davids railway station, which links us to Falmouth in the west, and London in the East.
Before this railway line was built (by I K Brunel, to link the deep water port of falmouth to london so his passengers could get his trains between london and cornwall and then his ships between cornwall and the USA, which saved ship travel time up the english channel, around the corner and then up the thames) we here in Exeter had our clocks set to a different time zone, by a matter of minutes, than London.
This played hell with train timetables (in those days they could run trains to a tighter schedule than we can 100 years later.. go figure) so one of the DIRECT results of the Great Wester Railway was the UK having a single unified time zone.
(they did other shit too, crappy seaside towns like Weston were renamed Weston Super Mare, a name it still carries to this day, because it sounded classier for the new rail tourism)
I guess you will find similar reasons for the US time zones
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
If we give the Brits time, can we keep the internet?
The time is now 6:44:46, EST.
Basically, the UK (and others?) want to keep 12 noon as when the sun is at it's highest point above Greenwich (pronounced Grenidge for our Atlanticly challenged), and change the clocks accordingly to keep them in sync, but the US want to let time gradually go out of sync from the Earth's physical position, so that at some point, way, way into the future, 00:00 might be when the Sun was highest in the sky over Greenwich. Which seems really silly to me.
Get your own free personal location tracker
For a pretty full understanding of what is happening, what has happened, and why, see history of the effort, implications of change, definition of terms
They want to make our workdays longer! Stop them!
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
...because the story just refers to "the Americans" or "the American delegation" or "US scientist"....
kinda blanket accusation, don't you think?
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
From the article:
:)
"It's going to be thousands of years before such a thing would apply anyway and to allow yourself to get to the stage where you're a whole hour out of synchronisation with the Sun seems to be mad. Why can't we just leave things the way they are?"
What's funny ( or sad, depending how you look at it ) is that this is coming from a person in a country which changes its clocks out of sync with the sun by just the aforementioned hour, every year.
And the proposition comes from another country that does just the same.
So we have dumb-ass scientists on both sides of the great pond. Lucky me to live in the middle. Either we got no insanity, or a total lack of sanity
Why are you attacking Kansas? We are good God Fearing Christians who are carrying out His Will. I honestly do not get why some people feel the need to persecute Christians. At least you people aren't using lions.
Yes we do. There will be one this year. The hourly 'pips' on BBC radio will get an extra pip at 2006-01-01 00:00:00.
Man, I'm really looking forward to the extra sleep!
There are two flavors of time - TAI (Temps Atomique International or somesuch, I believe), which is measured by the decay of cesium atoms. There is also UTC (Universal Coordinated Time) which is measured by the rotation of the earth.
Naturally, there is drift - this is where the leap seconds come from. Right now, UTC time is 22 seconds behind TAI time. What they are proposing, it seems, is eliminating UTC. I see absolutely no good or sound reason to do this, given that precision timekeeping insturments already measure time in TAI.
Besides, how would they switch? Have a "leap time scale" day when time suddenly shifts by 22 seconds? This stuff would cause *way* more problems than it would solve, and I'm pretty sure it would solve exactly 0.
5!... 4!... 3!... 2!... 1!... ...
... HAPPY NEW YEARS!!!!!
1?
The first half of the article is very parochial - kind of ooh the nasty Americans want to diminish the importance of Greenwich.
Which seems to be simply the delusion of the author, and has nothing to do with the subject of the discussion. The author has cast the entire thing as a US versus UK contest, with the noble UK scientists defending the importance of Greenwich, and the evil US overlords trying to steal it away and disrupt the lives of the common folk. First of all, I think if you polled US scientists, you'd find the vast majority of them quite content with the current system, and not calling for any change. In fact, you have to read halfway down the article to find out that the only people proposing a change are "US members of the International Telecommunications Union", without specifying which company they are referring to. Then somehow a handful of people at a telecommunications company issuing a proposal is amplified by this author to represent all US scientists and the views of Americans in general.
This is just a classic case of crappy sensationalist reporting.
Why dont we all take out our photon drives (laser pointer) point em westerly and fix the real problem?
We should just adopt the 28-hour day.
There's no need to pretend like we actually need to make full use of the daylight hours anymore. We have electricity and most most jobs involve working indoors anyway.
6 days a week with no Monday. Sounds brilliant.
But thanks for asking.
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
To be honest, we have US currency... why not US time? We can easily calculate US time using current systems, and then we don't have to worry about all their other peculiarities. They can bomb terrorists and take over the world in their own time, and we can cope with it because, just like we have to transfer US dollars to a useful currency, we can transfer US time to a meaningful worldwide time. What's the problem?
I want to move the freakin' Meridian to the US. Maybe NYC, or maybe somewhere closer to the middle of the country, like Dallas. What's so special about Greenwich? Hell, move it to NYC and make it GVMT.
Do you have ESP?
Let's have fewer Americans, you ignorant ass! Won't someone think of the children?!
What does it really matter? The system is not really that important so long as it is consistant. Whether you say 100, 1000, or 7463.54. The only reasons metric makes sense to a lot of people is because we are base 10 creatures, and therefore are more used to it. As long as the measurements are consistant and accurately describe the mechanics/behavior (as well as are relatable to others), who cares?
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
And some say US scientists were born that way. We need temporal standards in this immoral world.
Stop being singularity stupid! The answer is not to change what kind of ridiculous single day derived counting system to use, but to abandon the brainless lie of singularity and embrace the truth of nature's harmony, the 4 simultaneous day Time Cube!
That's Bigboo TAY! TAY!
Why stop at just changing time? That longitude and latitude stuff is so last century. And compasses have too many points on them, lets get rid of some of them...
I definitely don't understand why the Americans would propose dumping UTC. After all, leap seconds are for the convenience of the public.
If they are so interested in avoiding leap seconds, why don't they just use TAI and let the others keep using UTC?
GPG 0x1B479C78
A generation of Americans will be disadvantaged, and then future generations will be using what virtually the rest of the planet does. Unit conversions are WAY easier in metric, and I don't know about you, but I find base 10 far more intuitive.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The issue isn't "should the Greenwich meridian maintain its importance" (who cares) but rather "do we want the sun to be rising at 4pm in x thousand years". If we remove the link between "time" and the astronomical world - as is being proposed, that is the situation we will face, in the albeit moderately distant future.
My undersatnding is that the major justification being cited is that reseting some older equipment to take account of the leap second requires manual intervention, and that this is a pain.
Find Japanese addresses in English on Google Maps Japan: http://diddlefinger.com/
This proposal will make my life a living hell. Unless, the leap seconds were added on a strict schedule that was known well in advance. And even with that, I'll still have to change a butt-load of code to accomidate it.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
Why do the Americans want the system to change? The article seems pretty one sided. What are the benefits to the proposed changes?
Programmers of astronomical software already have trouble enough:
- The year -1 is followed by the year 1
- 4.10.1582 is followed by 15.10.1582, because only then the length of a year was measured with sufficient accuracy. The new system of leap years will only need a fix of one day in another thousand years.
- Last century Ephemeridical Time (ET) was introduced to serve as a constant measure of time (in contrast to the Universal Time (UT)). The commonly used time is UTC, which is running with the same "speed" as ET and being corrected every once in a while, when (UTC-UT) becomes greater than 0.9 seconds. Astronomical software has to know UT as well as the difference ET-UT: The positions of other planets have to be computed with ET and the rotational angle of the earth with UT.
ET-UT is more than 60 seconds at the moment already. Replacing UT/UTC with ET-60 s will not really make things easier and it will deprieve the old system of its benefits! If someone needs a ET-clock for doing satellite navigation, he shouldn't force everyone else to do so as well. If the U.S. scientists keep pushing, I'll switch to a russian time-server in the future.what are they going to do about this? ;)
Q: Why did the Roman coliseums go broke?
A: The lions ate up all the prophets.
Can I have some of whatever the mod that moderated this up is smoking? :)
"Time resources"? LMAO!
What problem would that solve exactly?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I never realized how much I appreciated DST until this year, when I got out of work at 5:00 PM and it was still light out; the day before it was almost dark at the same time.
we need Super Duper Double-Duty (tm) Daylight Saving Time. For every day of the year, turn the clock forward one hour at 3pm (since nothing gets done at work after 3pm anyway), and then turn the clock back one hour at 3am (since studies have shown that a significant percentage of Americans are sleep-deprived and thus the extra hour of sleep would give an instant boost to productivity!)
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
40+ posts and i still aint got a clue what this discussion is about. i honestly cant see what all the hububb is about.
I say we let them add their litle time change BUT with the condition that all road signage and measurement in the US be first in English and metric units and eventually only in metric. I mean my God, I deal with people on a daily basis where I have to constantly convert values because they dont understand what a mile is :). If we're standardizing time, lets standardize measurements too.We don't have to do it all at once, gradual phase in over say ten years is fine. And put a provision in there that something bad will happen to said scientists and government officials who fail to comply in that ten year period so that they are forced to stick to it.
Just my $.02
"The boy is dangerous, they all sense it, why can't you?"
obligatory text.
We could just have a leap year every 30758400 years =P.
Kinda like leap birthdays.. every 1424 or so years you turn two years older.
Or we can use earthquakes to adjust the earth's rate of spin to remain constant. *shrug*
SOme scientists have too much time on their hands.
unless I'm late because my clock is off...
.. the U.S. scientists must pledge to do all calculations and measurements in metric.
Typical Old-World Europe thinking. They "discovered" America too.
scrap the monobase! base 2 and base 16 aren't that hard to work in, and one doesn't really get thinking out of the box until they start thinking in prime bases. But counting on your fingers where bits are indicated by whether or not the fingers are touching the thumb is easily feasable, and provides for greater range of finger counting and is consistent with the concepts of the modern-day world.
If you think/meant people most don't want to sleep when it's dark anymore .. you are either funny or wrong. Streets are not well lit at night in most places .. hell anywhere .. how many places exist where being outside at night is bright like day? And in winter in the North .. it's cold enough in the daytime .. forget going out to lunch at work.
If you mean that people should work by a universal time system. Well it already exists, and few want to use it.
You can work in GMT or Zulu or whatever, or Unix time (milliseconds since 1970). etc. Important stuff is done in GMT or Unix time in the case of computers.
It's going to be harder than switching people from ipv4 to ipv6 to get them to switch to using GMT. (ie, why switch if the current system appears to work efficiently).
Plus you still have to know time differences if you want to schedule meetings without making it inconvenient for people. So the problem of remembering "how far ahead/behind Bob are we?" will still remain.
They're saving up Enlightenment instead of putting it to good use figuring out what makes sense to do.
The current system has worked well, so why change it?
The US is a bunch of foreigners, so why give them control over something so important?
We've seen what the US does to science, so why give them control over our measurement of time itself?
Hmm... a lot of the arguments used to support keeping 'control of the Internet' in US hands can be applied here to keep control over time measurement *out* of US hands.
Why not 100, or 10? Time would be so much simpler if it was metric.
The Admin and the Engineer
In other news, Kansas scientists are calling for an adjustment of -100 years.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Over the past decades, they've already been adding a leap second about every one and a half years to the clock. An automated system would probably be better than adding a second whenever the time comes. This would also give more knowledge to the general populace regarding leap seconds (I myself didn't know until about 8 months ago).
If only DNS root-servers were a predominant source for syncing GMT time. :P
guess we inherited it from the Soviet.
Why don't they change things that are more of a pain -- like the value of pi, or find another way of doing logarithms, or the roots of things. I would really appreciate that! Thanks in advance, scientist dudes!
BBC article completely misses the point. The international time reference, since the 1950's, has been UTC, and used tuned according
to atomic clocks, not the earth's rotation. There are time references used specifically for astronomy, such as sidereal time, solar time, etc... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_time) There is absolutely no reason why astronomical time references have to match precisely to the time reference used by normal people.
The problem is that, today, there is no algorithm for knowing when to insert leap seconds ahead of time, which means you cannot calculate any time accurate to the second which is more than 18 months in the future, because you have no idea whether or not they will decide to insert a leap second. Nor is there any algorithm, other than a table of the known values to determine when to insert leap seconds. Add that they used to add them in June in some years, and December in others, and sometimes had two in the same year, and you get a feel for how chaotic it is.
Accumulate these differences over twenty years, and you have a serious problem. That is why the global positioning system uses it's own time reference, which has no leap seconds. When you're calculating position based on propagation delays, leap seconds are a mess. so GPS time is currently (http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/gpstt.html) fourteen or fifteen seconds different from UTC. (how many leap seconds since 1999? no way to calculate, you just have to know.) Seconds are the basis for all computer based time scales. These little nudges make very little sense. It would be far smarter to insert a leap minute, every... oh... 90 years. Or make the leap second insertion an algorithmic event, and not some random decision negotiated among a committee of astronomers.
God made the universe in 6 days + (1*6)/((52/2)*7) seconds.
And a pretty obvious one at that.
Do try and read what you are moderating.
Mmmm.. Donuts
> Dude ... your ignorance is showing.
That should read "you're ignorance..." you ignorant idiot.
Skinner
To correct this, change the number of cycles of the Cesium or Rubidium atomic frequency in the definition of time, or make the Earth turn slower.
I'm positing that it's much easier to change the number in the definition of time than it is to change the period of the Earth's rotation.
To avoid a gratuitous /.ing of what would appear to be a private site here's the start of www.leapsecond.com
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Ten years ago I wanted to build a LED digital analog clock that would be accurate to better than one second per year -- so I would have the fun of adjusting it when a leap second occurred. This simple goal resulted in a most interesting journey into electronics, horology, astronomy, test equipment, quartz oscillators, rubidium and cesium atomic clocks, hydrogen masers, frequency counters and phase comparators, GPS, Loran C, GOES, and WWV / WWVB radio receivers. By now I've exceeded that goal by a factor of a million: the best clocks in my collection (active hydrogen masers) are accurate to better than one microsecond per year. Excluding national government laboratories, my home time lab now has the most accurate clock in the world. That makes me one of the time-nuts. Perhaps you've heard: A man with one clock knows what time it is. A man with two clocks is never sure. But I would add further: A man with three clocks is more sure than a man with two clocks. And so the clock collection started...
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Take it easy folks.
As of current, the leap seconds are added as we need them. High presission systems thus need to be updated every time such a correction occur... The high presission systems in general likely don't depend upon the sun or the stars position, so instead of having all systems update to follow the stars and the sun, it would be simple to device a offset system for those needing to adjust for positioning beyond the earth...
The final system may indeed be simpler this way on the expense of Greenwich loosing its role in time keeping. I don't really believe many others would be affected as we are talking thousands of years for a leap hour, which should correspond to a minute or two during the lifetime of a person...
What it matter for is only what we have today. Not a problem as I see it - the two systems should be able to run side by side, whereas the legacy systems requiring the leap second today could syncronize the time with leap adjusted clocks...
They're mining all this mass away from the center of gravity, and dumping it on the surface. so just we're slowing down just like a skater in a spin who puts out her arms.
:-)
(wild ass guess, but it's vaguely plausible, good enough for slashdot
There are multiple standards already ( http://www.leapsecond.com/java/gpsclock.htm )
UTC, GPS (+13sec from UTC), Loran (+22sec from UTC), TAI (+32sec from UTC).
The only difference this time is that they want to break UTC which us everyday folk use.
You know, how you can look at where the sun is in the morning and know that is the east?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Geeze, 200+ comments AND NOBODY'S understood what the article is about.
.. the "actual" time at a certain reference point on the earth .. a continuous, slightly wobbly value, impossible to predict with accuracy
Here's the deal: the earth's orbit isn't steady. It speeds up and slows down. So the *current* system is to add or subtract a "leap second" from UTC every few months. Nobody's *proposing* this system, it's the *current existing system*.
[Most computer systems (Unix included) totally BOTCH this, by the way. You can rig your machine to use TAI (the time *without* the correction) and add in the leap seconds for display purposes, but then you don't have anything to sync it up with because NTP only understands UTC.]
What some idiots (from Kansas?) have proposed is to let UTC drift from actual time, and only correct it every few thousand years with a "leap hour".
Personally, the system we have now is JUST FINE, this is some silly political thing, I believe cooler heads will prevail, and this system will be shot down. I sure HOPE so.
Here's a cheat sheet for you time novices (it's a little more complicated then this, especially the UT part, but this is a good way to think of it):
UT - Universal Time
TAI - International Atomic Time - the time according to an atomic clock. marches along at the exact same uniform rate, no matter what. A discrete, uniform sequence.
UTC - Coordinated Universal Time - TAI + accumulated leap second corrections to create an approximation of UT for use here on Earth for our activities.
Basically, on a regular schedule, some scientists examine UTC and UT, and declare whether or not a leap second is needed to keep the two from diverging.
The NEW PROPOSED system says, only do this correction every few thousand years instead of every 18 months, so that UT and UTC arbitrarily drift apart during those thousand years. That sounds pretty silly to me!
My boss always says "Im on company time".
The problem is simple - there are three groups of people with different demands; the scientist who want really accurate (and predictable) time, the peasants who want to "rise with the sun", and the star gazers who like to know the rotation of earth. It is impossible to reconcille the demands of all three groups.
In the old days, when the sundials were not very accurate, one time systems could keep everyone happy. When clocks got accurate enough, time zones became useful. With atomic clocks, leap second became useful. (I won't mention Daylight Saving Time since changeing the clock don't seem to actually change the rotational dynamics of the solar system, which means the amount of daylight doesn't actually change anywhere.)
The only sensible long term solution is to define multiple standards - the peasants can use local time (with single/double/triple daylight saving), globe trotters use UCT/GMT and scientists should just define an absolute time. We already have the first two and people who have to deal with possible complications already use GMT.
We have the technology to keep multiple times, it is much easier to convert as needed.
Until the US moves to Metric they should stay the hell away from changing the current time system.
It most likely would have saved The Challenger
The weathers here - Wish you were beautiful
Actually, he got it right, you're is an abbreviation of you are.
I'm a Book
On the Bookshelf
Hou bout we say it's 10 degrees Celcius instead?
Yeah we switched from Fahrenheit to Celsius years ago but I still don't know when to wear a jumper.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
From TFA:
Lie-in
This New Year's Day, we'll have an extra second in bed - an extra leap second will be added to the pips at midnight on the first of January.
Try "Rising Early". You don't get to sleep through the second between 12:00:00 and 12:00:01 twice - you "leap" over it! When clock-time gains a second, we lose it. I definitely notice the loss or gain with daylight savings, but I don't think I'll be going to bed early on 12/31 because of this.
They credit Sir John Herschel for suggesting in 1828 that time should be the same in large regions, and claim that GMT had been widely adopted in England, Scotland, and Wales by mid-century.
However, one nation-wide time zone clearly wouldn't work over a continental nation like the U.S. So apparently C. F. Dowd, a principal of a seminary for girls, was the first to suggest zones in 1869, and Canadian Sandford Fleming then suggested making such a system world-wide. Railroads in the U.S. and Canada began operating on Standard Railway Time on 18 Nov. 1883, reducing the number of railroad times from at least 56 to 4.
Also interesting is the changing of the time zone boundaries over the years. People seem to prefer the sun setting later, and there was an advantage to being in the same zone as the east-coast population centers, so the western boundary of the Eastern Time Zone has moved from it's original location through the middle of Ohio to the western edge of Indiana.
I don't even know when TV shows start!
"Tonight at 8/7 Central"
What the smeg does that mean? I've lived in Mountain time for about 26 years, and I have NO IDEA!
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
On my project he have GPS time. We like GPS time. It is always increasing. UTC time and associated leap seconds. Pain the but. Have to keep checking for leap seconds.. Deltas are more difficult. Siderial time (I don't know what this is) Zulu time, which I think is like UTC time with something different. And my favorite is the device that returns time in seconds since last sunday. Simulation time, which is UTC time but adjusted forward and back giving a change in leap seconds. That and the NTP (Network Time Protocol) thats supposed to keep everything in sync.
That the agony that is 32 bit software on a 64 bit unix machine..
Ugggg..
Please Please Please don't make this any more difficult.
Universal Time makes Lrrr angry! The time on Omincrom Persei VII is far different and superior to your Earth time! And what is the concept of this feeling they call "wuv"?!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
I'd like to change things to "a little closer to quitting" time, and "a little further from deadline" time.
This coming from the same country that is still trying (oops not really trying) to come to terms with standard units. What ever happened to Kilometres and Kilograms. Why do they still have to use pounds and miles. Just another step towards the universe revoles around the USA yawn. my 2c
...so, do you see the little bright flashes going off in your head yet?
smeg? Simple Menu Editor Gnome? It's bad enough I stumble across that name along with BUM in the Ubuntu forums. Do you REALLY need to torture me here as well??!
When will the world wake up and realize that the United Kingdom controls all time because they control the meridian. We need the UN to intervene her and remove this aggressive and unilateral control of time from the UK immediately. Once the UN is in control all nations can equally benefit from time and will be secure in knowing that a combined organization of beurocrats is in control. Of course, nations with limited time resources (like Singapore, with only one timezone), could be given more time and nations who have an abundance of time (like the US, with 4! timezones) could be forced to share equally with the rest of the world.
Another method is to add 1/47347200th (i'm sure we can compute a better fraction) of second per seconds to make time always accurate. 1 second added every 18th month ... (548 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes * 60 secondes).
Some will say : it will be hard to make accurate all clocks with this new standard.
How many of our home clock are 100% accurate everytime. Power lost, power fail, power low down for a fraction of second... We don't need to life a the near second.
for noon to be in the middle of the night?
No, he's not aboard the space station.
"It is the stillest words which bring the storm. Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world."
IANA time scientist, but it seems to me that a certain amount of fanaticism about removing all the clutter, and a dose of love of science fiction (if you have Perry Rhodan after #128 please email me), it ought to be possible to once and for all have an eminently durable and useful timesystem.
I also have the undoubtedly common experience of reloading ntpd to make sure my laptop is in sync and then checking the time on my mobile phone, but seldom wearing my expensive wristwatch since it has no battery and runs down when I take it off to type. And then I always feel like I'm in the twilight zone when this carefully synchronized time is far different from what the train station says, but I need to know if I have time to eat a burger before the express leaves. All this tells me keeping track of time is tough so I may have made some dreadful mistakes in my first swing at chronology.
dumping the leap second.
the parent is just an idiot who got modded up +4
ffs, what a luddite, head in the sand, "that's the way it's always been, bub", braindead attitude. 10 mins in a 10C environment is all it'll take to let you know EXACTLY how it feels outside.
Don't deny change 'cos you're unwilling to learn it.
Caution: May contain nuts.
US members of the International Telecommunications Union
updating leap seconds must not have been in the latest labor contract, so this is clearly an "it's not my job" issue.the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I've been saying this for years, and people always look at me like I'm crazy. So what if it's dark at 8am?
One thing that has always bothered me is this: When you hear there's been an earthquake in Pakistan and it happened at 3 in the morning, whose 3 in the morning are they talking about? Mine? Theirs? Zulu's?
I've heard that there are people that believe that by the end of this century, one will be able to travel from New York City to Los Angeles in merely five minutes. Once that happens, we no longer need time zones.
But talk to people about this--real people. They'll think you're nuts. The sun rises between 5-7am, dammit.
Well, you wouldn't really work from 1:00PM 'til 9:00PM. The thing about a "universal time" is that the notion of AM and PM goes away.
--When you buy proprietary software, you don't get better software. What you get is the right to complain about it.
Precise time, and the nature of time, is a subject of particular interest to
the satellite community. A few of you may be aware of a proposal on the
table at the ITU WP-7A to abandon leap seconds. That is, to decouple
what we all think of as "time" from "sundial" time. For thousands of years
solar time has been the basis of civil time with clocks adjusted to make it
so. And for the last 30 years it's been maintained that way by the insertion
of occasional leap seconds into civil time.
The proposal has profound implications, and I cannot possibly do the subject
justice in this forum. You will have to do your own research.
A symposium on the future of UTC was held in May 2003, and is recorded at http://www.ien.it/luc/cesio/itu/ITU.shtml
Much detail can be gleaned from http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/
dupe
I don't see any new developments since the last time.You know, I find email/mailing lists much more convenient for this. I think it's obvious that the Free Software world is succeeding very well at being an international organisation by using communication methods that allow for time delays, but also cope with people who can respond quickly. Alternatively, if it's such a big organisation and the meeting is crucial to have in real-time for the sake of the company, then the regional managers can hop on a plane and meet in some nice location. If they *need* to have that kind of meeting all the time, then I think it indicates a deeper management structure problem.
If some organizations are using communication methods that don't suit the scale of their organization, it's really their own fault. It's not like there aren't alternatives.
TAI is the ticking of the atomic clocks.
UTC is TAI plus an integer offset to keep it within a second of UT1.
Leap seconds are when that integer offset is changed. They can in principle be double, or negative, or double negative. There has never been a negative leap second, but that doesn't mean they're not possible.
You can get the full details from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time or http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~rfisher/Ephemerides/times. html
There was a bill in front of the UK Parliament when the Major government fell, which hasn't been re-introduced by the Blair government, to change UK `legal' time from GMT to UTC. In practice, UK legal time _is_ UTC simply because getting hold of UT1 is almost impossible. MSF and DCF77 (the UK and German equivalents of WWV)transmit UTC, and almost everyone uses either those or GPS. If, say, BT wanted to switch between peak and low rate charging at 1800 GMT, I have no idea where they'd obtain a reference from. So they use UTC (I know, because I've helped sort out NTP from MSF and GPS references for kit in the BT network).
ian
I think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
...just ancient spelling. He's probably from Kansas.
This is the first thing I thought of too. Most computers refer to your time zone as + or - GMT. People in the business world could easily use this instead of silly ideas like metric or global time. Hell, this country cant change to metric road signs and speeds.
"Do you know what time it is?!"
"27:50 . . . Is that early?"
"It's going to be thousands of years before such a thing would apply anyway and to allow yourself to get to the stage where you're a whole hour out of synchronisation with the Sun seems to be mad."
Erm... don't we do this every year?
Scientists have way too much time on their hands.
Rather than having to remember one simple calc about their timezone, you'd have to remember what offset their working day was from yours, and try to work out whether 82:45 was in the middle of their lunch. Much harder. When travelling you'd have to learn what the typical local rising and meal times were. Typical Americans can't even deal with the concept of a currency exchange rate, so they're not going to manage that.
Once you're used to working across timezones, you start to remember to state the timezone you're talking about up front. It's not so hard, and certainly easier than any of these radical alternatives.
this guy
We've seen suggestions in this thread that we use Zulu time, GMT, and UTC.
;-)
So why don't you people make your minds? Which is it to be?
If we can't settle this choice, how do we expect the rest of the world fo follow our lead.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
On a side note it was announced yesterday that 4 of the 6 BoE members that voted for Creationism^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HIntelligent Design now have competition for their seats in the next election. I'm hoping for a Dover repeat.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
For a few time zones, this isn't that big a deal, as the day shift is mostly at night. But there will be a huge political battle about which time zone is privileged to have the day shift occur at current midnight, and which time zone is stuck with a day shift occuring at current midday.
Don't deny change 'cos you're unwilling to learn it.
I am always willing to learn change when there's a reason to. But I'll ALWAYS deny pointless change.
The reason the metric system is a good idea is because it makes conversion between units easy. But who is going to have to do temperature conversions?
What, is Joe Sixpack suddenly going to want to add ten kilocalories to a liter of water, and in order to know how much heat to apply he has to factor in the ambient temperature, which is in FAHRENHEIT! DOH! Foiled again by the luddite murricans!
The fahrenheit scale is already base 10, so why change it? Nobody but a scientist does math with temperature. It's just another example of change just for the sake of change, and that, I cannot abide.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
http://www.ukcert.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Time_Insec urity_and_the_Network_Time_Problem~Part1
I don't think that the Sun rising on Mondy and setting on Tuesday will be a problem. In fact, the current ambiguity of what day it is will go away. It will no longer be tomorrow in another part of the world, it will be exactly the same time.
I can see confusion arising when using ambiguous terms such as "today" and "tomorrow", which could represent a fixed or a floating period. In other words, since today is Friday, tomorrow could be Saturday, but using a fixed time system tomorrow could be Saturday, or it could represent whatever day it is after I go to sleep and wake up next.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
For fear of sounding like a true Roddenberry freak, Stardate moves slightly slower than earth days. What we perceive as an earth day is the cycle of time by which the earth has rotated so that the sun is in the same twice measured position of the sky. The problem with this measurement is that the earth itself has moved slightly less than a 1 degree arc around the sun (360 degrees/365 days = 1 degree), so that the earth has actually not made a complete revolution by the time one "day" has passed, 355 degrees, in fact.
Stardate assumes that a more external point of reference, like Alpha Centauri, instead of Sol. The beauty of Stardate is that there are almost exactly 360 days in the year - every day is a single degree around the sun. Also, a beacon planted on earth at a specific longitude could be read by an external source (starship?) at regular intervals independent of earth days (every 23 hours and 41 minutes).
I'll try to find it, but these came from a conversation with Roddenberry's original staff, before Rick Berman and staff bastardized the concept of Stardate in order to make it more "accessible". If anyone can help me corroborate with links, that would be great.
Solomon Chang
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
Exactly why I think that we should make DST permanent. Except that the right way to go about it is to abolish DST and just change working hours from 8 to 4. But it;s too hard for me to get up on time to get to work at 8, so I'll just work 9 to 4.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Yes, the timestamp will be 64bits by 2038, but that does not help zoneinfo. Its file format is based on exhaustively listing all non linear transitions. For a 64-bit timestamp, this would require gigabytes of storage for a single zoneinfo file. Not a good solution. The zoneinfo files are generated by zic - zoneinfo compiler - from a list of rules. So obviously, the new format will need to incorporate rules of some sort directly, and be interpreted (and probably caching the exhaustive list for recently used time ranges).
Nope. Our mining has only a miniscule effect on the rotational speed. It has been slowing down for billions of years as a result of tidal forces from the moon dragging around large amounts of water and causing large amounts of friction. Luckily, the moon is also getting farther from the earh, so the effects of friction will slow down over time. Eventually one face of the Earth will always face the same face of the moon and we will spin as a binary planet. The moon, which has less mass than the Earth, has ALREADY stopped spinning and the same face always faces us. Pluto and its moon also already are locked face to face, but Pluto is also much smaller than the Earth.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Are you leaving out the AM/PM code on purpose? There's no complete sense of the fullness of the "baroque" adjective until you include that.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Industry is beginning to use very tight time synchonization to control machine motion. One thing being discussed is what time standard to use. UTC and IEEE 1588 seem obvious -- except for the question of how to handle leap seconds if an application is running when a leap second is inserted.
Fun facts about civil timekeeping:
- The leap year algorithm can be static because the calendar changes slowly. The corresponding algorithm for time is the 24 hour clock itself, not leap seconds, which are a higher order effect whose equivalent is currently completely ignored (as it should be) for the calendar.
- We don't have leap seconds because the Earth is transferring angular momentum to the lunar orbit. We have leap seconds because the Earth has already slowed down since the 1820 epoch that effectively corresponds to the definition of the SI second.
- We have just passed through a seven year lull in leap seconds. The overall trend is one leap second per 18 months, corresponding to a 2 ms/day mismatch between atomic time and the spinning Earth.
- The length of the mean solar day is growing by about an additional 2 ms per century. As the length of day grows, leap seconds will be required more and more frequently - a quadratic effect. Don't panic, though! The current UTC standard is good for hundreds of years yet.
- The real issue isn't the variability of the Earth's rotation, it is the misidentification of the original definition of the second as 1/86400 of a (varying) mean solar day with the more recent (static) SI unit of time. The original proposal was to call the SI unit an "essen" in honor of a well known (to some) timekeeper.
- When the mean solar day is increased by one full second (hundreds of centuries hence), the moon will have receded by about one mile.
- The day is actually *shorter* now than a hundred years ago, because the long term lunar trend is dwarfed by short term variations that are an order of magnitude larger (see http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html).
- Each missed leap second would be equivalent to moving the prime meridian 300 meters at the latitude of Greenwich.
Gee, this sounds a lot like:9 &tid=103&tid=164
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/30/13523
Accurate longitudinal fixes are based upon the time differential between where you stand and a meridian of known location and time (e.g. the Greenwich meridian). UTC not only tells you what time it is, it also lets you calculate precisely where you stand (or float or fly). One second of time at the equartor amounts to roughly 1450 feet (442 meters). Geography - and your property bounaries - are linked to time.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
In backward parts of the planet like the US our clocks only have half the hours on them 1-12. In order to communicate the time fully you have to code it "AM" or "PM" otherwise a date at 1 O'Clock could be ambiguous leaving one to wonder whether to interrupt an afternoon siesta or a night's sleep. The AM and PM thus are an essential part of the encoding that we USians have to use to tell time. In a rational region like Europe where hours are 1-24 that isn't a problem. That is also a reason why time in the US is "baroque."
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.