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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. "
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
They were "spinning". By the time you got to the actual proposal, you already had a tainted opinion of it, only to have them tell you that the scientists in question don't want to comment about it.
It was a rather heavy handed approach to it, I might add.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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
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
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
"Splitting the two doesn't seem to make much of a difference at least to the average citizen"
It will make a difference because currently the drift is fixed by adding leap seconds every few years. As the timing of the earth's rotation isn't constant, this works because you can add these small increments as and when needed.
Now, the International Telecommunications group want to fix this drift by adding an extra hour or day at a much greater interval. This has a lot of implications for the average citizen because it means that over time, you will go out of sync by up to 59 minutes or a day or so until the correction is made.
Consequently, the US proposal to change it boils down to them being lazy and wanting to make less adjustments to their clocks. From my point of view, it just seems to make sense to stay as close to the astronomical timings as possible and hence stick with the smaller leap seconds as they make very little difference to the overall timing drift.
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.
The problem is that you don't know in advance when http://hpiers.obspm.fr/International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) is going to introduce another leap second. They monitor Earht roration and could do it with only 6 month notice. The latest leap second was anounced this summer and we had to spend few weeks to add it to our data files and test the app before the release. If we had a release a month earlier we would not have included it and it would result in a small, but unacceptable errors unless users upgrade our software. It basically means that there is no way to build an embedded software and leave it running disconnected from anything and maintain high time accuracy at the same time. You either have to create a system for automatic updates of code and data, or rely on human operator to make changes. Both methods introduce unnesessary risks and inconviniences.
If you were all good, God-fearing Christians, you'd be fine. But there's 15 or 16 people who want to learn things in school, and they need looking out for. That, and for some reason you people insist on voting for candidates running for the federal government, so your backwardness affects us almost as much as it does you.
I know you're a troll, but I can imagine other people actually wondering that.
I don't think that is true. Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) had stardates such as 8000, etc. However, TNG (The Next Generation) started using 41000 through 47999 (1st season episodes were 41xxx (aired in 1987), 2nd season were 42xxx, etc). DS9, Voyager carried on this convention. TOS is approximately 100 years before TNG. I don't see the relationship!
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.
You can't maintain a highly accurate clock without external synchronization. Why doesn't your external synchronization source include leap-second information (including when the next one is going to occur, as soon as it is known)? It's no more error prone than having the clock data itself be wrong.
The application itself should be tested against leap-seconds, there's no reason you should have to test to see if a particular leap-second is going to cause a problem (just as you don't have to test it for each time the clock rolls over from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00). You add ONE LINE to a leap-second file, if you did it right, or just let NTP do it for you if you did it even more correctly.
Note that the NTP epoch implementation is itself arguably done incorrectly. A reasonable kernel can handle it better by having the NTP daemon update a leap-second file, keep a fixed Unix epoch and correct to UTC in the libraries while keeping a constantly running clock going.
For example, 44500 - 8000 stardays = 36500 stardays.
That'd be 100 Earth years.
does the fractional part in 9999.9 (from GP) means the time of day? (.5 == noon?)
gtkaml.org
High noon is only high for people in the center of a time zone anyway. For other people it's off by 15 minutes on average. Being a minute or so off solar time wouldn't really be a big deal.
Switching from leap seconds to leap minutes does not solve the problem. It just makes the adjustments larger and less frequent. And as a practical matter, it also means that a larger proportion of time-critical systems WILL fail, because they won't be designed to handle the leap minute, and even if they were, the functionality wouldn't be properly tested. At least currently the potential problem is encountered almost yearly, and ignoring it doesn't lead to a large discrepancy.
If we switch to leap minutes, and assuming that there is no breakthrough in software development practices, then 90 years from now we'll either have another Y2K scare because of the impending leap minute adjustment, or people will just decide to scrap the leap minute and either return to more frequent leap seconds, or just give up and let the time base drift off sync from earth's rotation. I suspect that the latter is the actual aim of the proposal, if they have thought it through at all.