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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. "
No, really, it is about time.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
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.
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?
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
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?
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
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
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.
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!
I'm sure its just you dude.
I can't imagine two separate people actually Reading TFA.
But honestly, I'd be supprised if a proposal like this wasn't horribly convoluted to read.
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
Takes some getting used to, but when you are traveling across that country by train, it is *mighty* convenient
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
Um did you actually read the link you posted? That story is talking about a group of US scientists wanting to eliminate leap seconds and replace them with leap hours that are extremely far apart. This issue is just wanting to standardise the delay between leap seconds.
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.
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
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!
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?
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!
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.Q: Why did the Roman coliseums go broke?
A: The lions ate up all the prophets.
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.
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...
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.
"is a time service that transmits from Boulder Colorado"
As a resident of Fort Collins, CO and (now) Boulder, CO, let me clarify:
WWV transmits from Fort Collins, CO on 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20 MHz. You need a shortwave radio to pick it up (though, in the Fort Collins area, you can pick it up on a crappy AM radio tuned to the upper end of the band).
NIST is located in Boulder, CO, and it serves as the frequency and time reference for the atomic clocks in Fort Collins.
WWVB is also transmitted from Fort Collins, CO, providing a digital time service for radio-synchronized clocks. If you care about having the right time, these are a cheap way to get it.
Actually, to be perfectly accurate, they will get an extra pip at 2005-12-31 23:59:60.
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.