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Vote To Eliminate Leap Seconds
Mortimer.CA writes "As discussed on Slashdot previously, there is a proposal to remove leap seconds from UTC (nee 'Greenwich' time). It will be put to a vote to ITU member states during 2008, and if 70% agree, the leap second will be eliminated by 2013. There is some debate as to whether this change is a good or bad idea. The proposal calls for a 'leap-hour' in about 600 years, which nobody seems to believe is a good idea. One philosophical point opponents make is that the 'official' time on Earth should match the time of the sun and heavens."
We call this "putting off the problem".
We can ignore the problem then too. Eventually, morning and evening will be on different days. We might just gain or lose a whole day. Heck, we can ignore the problem forever. We'll be off by a year, then a decade...
Yeah, because the best way to to deal with a small problem is to put it off until it becomes a really big problem.
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Um... isn't the whole point of this article that some people think it's a good idea? TFS even says there is debate over whether it is a good or bad idea!
It gets worse than that, even.
What is a year?
Is it the time from perihelion to the next perihelion?
Is it the time from zenith on the shortest day to zenith on the shortest day next year?
Is it the time for when a star within our galaxy is in the same position again?
Is it the time for when a star outside our galaxy is in the same position again?
The earth's orbit rotates, and the solar system rotates, in a galaxy that rotates. And speculation is that the universe rotates too.
I don't really care what they do with leap seconds, but IMO their time would be better spent abolishing that routine-breaking, parent-killing, accident-causing abomination which is Daylight Savings Time.
The only benefits I can see is slightly later barbecues in summer and a six-monthly reminder to check smoke detector batteries about the house.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Run computers on TAI (International Atomic Time). Keep it constantly flowing, and never add or remove seconds, as per the definition. Then simply calculate UTC in software from a published leap offset between the two, which compensates for the leap seconds:
UTC = TAI - leapseconds
Then define all the timezones off of UTC as normal. All this basically does, is make the calculations for the timezones into a few hours plus or minus a few seconds. This makes a lot more sense, because then you actually have a fundamental time (TAI) which doesn't have discontinuities, but if you want to consider your astronomical orientation, you look at UTC or your local time. We don't need to redefine these types of time, because these already exist. We just need to use them more intelligently.
I bet it would be a considerable challenge to find 12 watches synchronized within 30 seconds of each other. So we're worried about seconds of mismatch between sundials and the only computer on earth that isn't connected to the internet? I agree with the article. Leave UTC time alone and synchronize to GPS time instead. The rest of the world will go on being happy having their watch within a couple minutes of the "official time."
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We could just fire off some nukes every six months or year to control the orbital speed of the earth around the sun.
Congratulations, you completely failed to understand the fundamental difference between a day and a year! A feat accomplished by few to this day!
What defines the day is the rotation speed of the Earth around itself, not the orbital speed around the Sun. Besides, as some other people pointed out, this whole leap second thing is irregular, or if you prefer, one step forward, one step back, because the speed of rotation of the Earth varies slightly.
You just got troll'd!
Chinese didn't "invent" decimal time. Phrases like "in the 1/10000 th part of a chand" and words like paramchand (not accurate transliteration; chand = second) etc., are very common in Sanskrit text. Add the fact that Decimal system itself was invented in India only means that Decimal time was "invented" in India.
Why I am using double-quotes for "invented"? Because no one can invent time. As a human you want to divide time to keep track of it. And you can only do that using the numeral system you know! Indians knew decimal system so they divided it into factors of 10, Sumerians used sexagesimal system, so they divided it into 60.
It is not the division that bears any importance in invention. It is the device which one can use to measure. If you don't have clocks to measure 1/10000 th part of second, it means nothing to write it down. Ancient Chinese are no different.
The question is what do you want to do with the time of day. Should it be astronomically based? This is not a trivial question.
Many electric grids are required to be timed with accuracy of better than 10 milliseconds. Remote Telemetry Units need to record events with a time stamp that might mean something to an operations control center. The problem is what do you do with leap seconds?
The POSIX standard time epoch doesn't include leap seconds. So you're left with a terrible morass of a problem. Do you do what the NTP deamon does, by slewing the clock at some known rate? The problem with that is that while events remain in sequence, the time between events is not accurate. Do you simply include a second 59th second? The problem there is that events will be recorded out of order and they can't be sorted back.
And yet, many also have legal requirements to adhere to a UTC based time standard.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the problem isn't the leap-second concept. The problem is our damnable entrenched software standards. We're trying to fix this problem by creating another.
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I count by placing my hands palm down just above a surface (very much like I'm about to start typing). Then I move my fingers up and down. If a finger is touching the surface, that's a 1 bit. If it is not, it's a 0. Lately I've been not using my thumbs, thus giving me one byte, conveniently broken into two nybbles for hex conversion.
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If nothing else, we'd stimulate the living hell out of the world's economy.
This is the broken window fallacy, nothing more.
Besides, the value of units of measurement lies in their consistency. Changing the second is worse than leap years or leap seconds or leap hours, because any time someone needs a precise measurement, they turn to the second.
Keep UTC with the leap second. Civilian time can use that.
For UT1, eliminate the concept of hours, days, etc. Time will be told by the second only. Maybe even call it something else like a "chron". You can talk about hectochrons, millichrons, kilochrons, etc. In fact, start the counting of "chrons" at January 1, 1970.
Now, if you use chrons, there is no more link between days or years, and no more leap seconds. Computer systems like GPS or space travel which get thrown off by leap seconds, but don't really depend upon the concept of "day" or "year", can use chrons. People who depend upon the astronomical time can use seconds and live with leap seconds. To each, their own. And, converting between the two units is quite really simple.
The real silliness of the whole proposal is that these scientists actually think their decision will eliminate the leap second. Astronomers will simply ignore the whole thing and go back to GMT. So will all the governments which means all the atomic clocks will still use leap seconds. UTC will simply disappear, and we're back to square one.