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."

Comments

Re:Metric time?

[daeley]

The French tried Decimal time (aka French Revolutionary Time) for a while, although of course the Chinese invented it.

Decimal time always reminds me of the scene in Metropolis with two clocks on the office wall -- a 24-hour clock and a 10-hour clock (the length of the workers' shifts).

Why not just make each second a little longer?

[drgroove]

I thought of this issue years ago, and had actually sat down and done the math at one point... basically, to solve the time discrepancy, just slightly lengthen the second. Everything lines up. Of course, every book, piece of software, scientific instrument, medical equipment, ... well, basically everything in human civilization ... would need to be re-build, re-calibrated, re-programmed, re-manufactured, etc. If nothing else, we'd stimulate the living hell out of the world's economy.

Other way

[professorfalcon]

How about going the other way... leap microseconds. Many times during the day. Then nobody will hardly notice.

Re:Other way

[4D6963]

How about going the other way... leap microseconds. Many times during the day. Then nobody will hardly notice.

Actually it sounds like a good idea. As someone else suggested, the difference due to leap seconds is so small that only atomic clocks are precise enough to need to take them into account. And since we're all synced on atomic clocks anyways we could just make that happen transparently upstream.

What would be wrong with

[maroberts]

A leap minute every 10 years (or so)?

One event every 10 years does not cause lots of disruption, and being a minute out of sync with solar time is not large enough to be a problem. You'd notice an hour's difference if you're in a northerly latitude and have Daylight Saving Time...

What a number of people don't realize...

[swamp_ig]

The leap second is required because the earth's spin is slowing down in a complex, non-linear way.

Changing the length of the second simply won't work, in a couple of hundred years we'll be right back to where we started again. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second for details.

The leap hour is a daft idea, why change something that isn't broken, if a tad inconvenient.

Re:How about DST

[julesh]

DST is set by local governments. This is an entirely different thing, an international standards body messing around with time, instead.

BTW: I'm of the opinion that it's not DST that should be abolished, but non-DST. Non-DST time is a good mathematical division of the day, centred equally around 12:00 (+- 30mins). Unfortunately, as a society, we seem to have decided to centre our actual lives around 13:00 instead. Switching permanently to DST would fix this.

Re:Your post - Bollocks

[ultranova]

There are two people, Tina Farrel and a sales assistant that need to be darwinised.

Personally, I think the people who judge other people fit to be "darwinised" - especially based on a page-long Web article - are the ones we could do without, rather than the people who's worst known flaw is that they can't count below zero.