Slashdot Mirror
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."
Just hang on a sec....
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...
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).
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I've been keeping time with my sundial and temple-top observatory the way Ra intended! Damn you kids and your new-fangled timekeeping.
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.
How about going the other way... leap microseconds. Many times during the day. Then nobody will hardly notice.
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...
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
This is why I refuse to set the time on my VCR...
788652 = 2 x 2 x 3 x 3 x 19 x 1153
Yeah, because the best way to to deal with a small problem is to put it off until it becomes a really big problem.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Or better, wake up at 256, eat lunch at 512 andd GOTO sleep at 1024.
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!
Yeah, this 600 years stuff is nice but who will remember to adjust clocks in 600 years? It's far better to have an instantaneous solution to the problem than a remote one.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
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.
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.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make
Leap years are to deal with correcting the length of the year, which isn't an integral number of days. Leap seconds are to deal with the fact that the length of a day changes slowly and at a variable rate. It's not the same problem at all.
Yay, imperial time!
The smallest unit is the "Moment", and then the "While" (or, less used, the "Whilst"). A while is about 14.4 moments. Then you have the "long while", which is 13.8 whiles, then the "time", and "long time"...
For example, it took me a while and three moments to write this comment. I'm not a quick typer...
Tis women makes us love, Tis Love that makes us sad, Tis sadness makes us drink, And drinking makes us mad.
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
We could just fire off some nukes every six months or year to control the orbital speed of the earth around the sun. Just keep tuning the orbit to our atomic clocks instead of vice-versa.
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 think it would be soo much easier to throw away our clocks & base everything on the number of seconds since 00:00:00 January 1st 1979 from now on.
Come on it's been nearly 2008 years since we had BC, it's time for a change !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Buffer overflow [R]estart [R]eboot [R]einstall
There were 240 pence to the old (pre-decimalisation) pound, comprised of 20 shillings each worth 12 (old) pence. Do you remember guineas, crowns, half-crowns, shillings, tanners (6-penny piece), threepenny bit, pennies, half-pennies, farthings (a quarter penny)? I do. I suspect that I am quite a bit older than you and I cannot ever remember there being 120 pence to the pound. So either please provide a citation or confess that you are mistaken/talking bollocks. :-)
But the main thrust of your post was correct with regards to dividing sums of money easily. Or at least it was until the education system decided that mathematics and mental arithmetic were not the most important subjects in life. I'm not sure how some of today's young people could cope with such problems.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
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."
New! Device Legs: These legs will help your poor OEM installed product escape any hamfistedness it may encounter. Ava
You're off by a factor of 3600. It's "leap hours" that are being proposed; We already have leap seconds. Of course, I'm not sure the math from TFA makes too much sense anyway, as I don't recall having an average of 3 or 6 leap seconds every year.
Inherently, those who want to get rid of leap seconds also want to get rid of time zones (at least they indirectly do).
Having our clocks NOT agreeing with astronomical time, completely eliminates all the benefits of time zones.
Whether you actively think about it or not, our sense of direction is substantially driven by the combination of our clocks, and the Sun. We use it as a reference all the time (why do you think it's harder to find your way in a new area, when it's dark?). Even if there's no other defining features, there's still the Sun to tell us which way is North (or South), and our clocks give us a reference to relatively where the Sun should be. Subtly change someone's clocks, and you'll see them having a slightly more difficultly with their (otherwise good) sense of direction.
Seems to me, the only argument here is that there are a few groups who _really_ just happen to need TAI time, but they see that it's just much easier to access sources of UTC time, and so want to redefine UTC (eliminating leap seconds) so that it is monotonic, and strictly corresponds with TAI at all times. Did I miss anything?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
That would be an interesting transition period as people got used to indicating or recognizing the numbers 4 or 128...
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Won't somebody think of the sundials!? I mean, c'mon! Sundials are cool and important! And what about Stonehenge?
Actually, I'm in favor of keeping UT1 and TAI in sync. But not for the sundials
Does your significant other love shoes?
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.