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The Future of Time: UTC and the Leap Second
rlseaman writes "UTC ("Coordinated Universal Time") is very close to being redefined to no longer track Earth rotation. Clocks everywhere — on your wall, wrist, phone or computer — would stop keeping Solar time. 'American Scientist' says: 'Before atomic timekeeping, clocks were set to the skies. But starting in 1972, radio signals began broadcasting atomic seconds and leap seconds have occasionally been added to that stream of atomic seconds to keep the signals synchronized with the actual rotation of Earth. Such adjustments were considered necessary because Earth's rotation is less regular than atomic timekeeping. In January 2012, a United Nations-affiliated organization could permanently break this link by redefining Coordinated Universal Time.'"
Taco, all you did is quote the article summary. I can spin up an RSS reader to do that.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
The ONE time I try to RTFA, I CAN'T?? Unbelievable. "The content you've requested is available without charge only to active Sigma Xi members and affiliates."
I made an app! Shoutium
I know there is a difference but they could have just redefined GMT rather than coming up with another name altogether. UTC doesn't even work as an acronym, it's just some French plot to wipe Greenwich from history.
I expect this is the trouble the Mayan's ran into with their calendar ending in 2012 and thus the leap seconds leading to the end of the world next year.
If time is kept by atomic clocks that's not synchronized with the Earth's rotation then one day, Midnight could be when the Sun is high in the sky!
We can't have this! Think of the children! They'll learn that Noon is when the Sun is high in the sky only to see it pitch black!
We need to stop this insanity now!
Here's the full PDF version.
So Greenwich Mean Time is GMT, Pacific Standard Time is PST does that mean that Coordinated Universal Time would be CUnT?
Insert signature here...
As long as we're redoing time I say we convert it to the metric system. This was hard to do before because we kept trying to keep time in line with the rotation/orbit of the earth. But if all that's going out the window, let's just divide everything up into units of 10 and be done with it.
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<Kirk Voice> Stardate.....65500...My...solar TIME, clock...seems to be...malFUNCTIONing...perhaps Coordinated....UniversalTime...is finally...UPON us. <\Kirk Voice>
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
I really don't care about coordinated universal time or time that has to be regular. I care about the real rotation of the Earth and the Earth's orbit around the sun. So, what we see in the sky is always gonna matter most to me and not what humans create :) It doesn't matter to me if it's irregular.
In 2012, a new definition of time that is only relative to the Earth's reference frame falls short.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Seriously this has been an issue for along time - GPS time does not include leap seconds and I am tired of having to write software that let's user adjust for the variable amount of leap seconds - nobody really cares if the earths rotation is synchronized with " UTC"
10 is an arbitrary base and works poorly for time. Earth time works very well in Base-12, which is what we have now.
If you want to think of the children, the Egyptians and Babylonians taught their children to count on the knuckles of their four non-thumb fingers. The 10-finger-number system is just an unfortunate thing that came along with arabic numerals, which are very useful.
I saw we adopt something from the UNICODE set to mean eleven and twelve. Say, they're not 1-teen and 2-teen, are they?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Even if we don't manage to exterminate ourselves in the interim we won't be getting off this rock in any meaningful way for several more generations on even the most optimistic forecasts. What is the point of divorcing UTC from humanity's relationship to our day to day on earth?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
... could we also get rid of Daylight Savings Time?
If time is kept by atomic clocks that's not synchronized with the Earth's rotation then one day, Midnight could be when the Sun is high in the sky!
We can't have this! Think of the children! They'll learn that Noon is when the Sun is high in the sky only to see it pitch black!
You're right, even if accidentally. Time keeping that is meaningful for most humans is much more important than time that is meaningful for just a handful of computer operators and nuclear scientists. They need to stop being so ego-centric.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Leap seconds are a disaster. Rare and seemingly unimportant enough that software don't handle them, important enough to break stuff.
From now on, a UTC "day" will always correspond to exactly 86400 seconds. To correct for the slowing of earth, time zones can simply be adjusted by an hour, every time we'd otherwise have had 3600 leap seconds. (This will happen the first time around year 2500.)
We say 365 days.
We observe 365.25.
The tropical year (equinoxes+solstices) is closer to 365 solar days, 5 hours 49 minutes 19 seconds
The sidereal year is 1.0000385 tropical years (365.256363004 ) (20m24.5128s longer than tropical year)
So may times...
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
This has been *progressing*?
This is possibly the stupidest idea in history. Their stated goal: taking complexity out of time handling code -- *cannot happen*: it will *still* have to account for all the years we did this.
And it will break *lots* of stuff.
You have no idea how much code I'll have to look through to make sure that it doesn't assume |UTC-UT1| < 1.
Support SETI@home
and TFA is apparently only available to Sigma Xi members. Great work there, Slashdot editor.
Since the summary is direct copypasta of the terrible abstract, does anyone have a tl;dr on this?
This is in preparation for the impact of asteroid 2004 MN4 (Apophis). Once that happens there will be no life on Earth. Without UTC, we will have to leave a person on Earth so if we want to know the time, we will have to call him -- like the old telephone time service.
Fight Spammers!
The world is a lot smaller place than a hundred years ago. Time zones especially when combined with daylight savings time add nothing to our society and make for a royal PITA. The old term midnight is the only issue. Who cares if you work from 01:00 to 09:00 or 08:00 to 17:00.
Why would it work more poorly for time than for distance or anything else?
Although one thing I do find amusing about the whole metric vs. traditional units is that one of the primary arguments for moving to metric units is that it makes conversion between units easier. The only problem is that about the only units that I convert between on a regular basis is ... time, which is not handled in base 10. (I do think that we'd be better off switching to metric, but ease of unit conversion is a pretty minor point).
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Horrors! in 5000 years we might get to the point where the sun reached its height at 3 in the afternoon....
will simply ignore UTC and continue to show the time based on the earth's rotation. All this means is that UTC loses any small shred of relevance that it once may have had to the common man. So go ahead, redefine UTC and we can all just go back to using GMT for our reports, syslog messages, traps etc. that all have far more to do with the time as experienced by users than the time as experienced by a cesium atom. I expect that soon after the decision is made someone will start gmt.pool.ntp.org and utc.pool.ntp.org and we'll have a choice.
Nullius in verba
If UTC would be redefined to no longer be adjusted to Earth's rotation, then what would be the point of having UTC at all? We already have a time scale that counts seconds without adjusting to Earth's rotation: TAI
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Say, they're not 1-teen and 2-teen, are they?
In Chinese, basically they are.
It's called TAI. Redefining UTC is just plain stupid - it was created to track sol. If someone doesn't like the fact that doing so requires occasional adjustments, then they chose to use the wrong time scale. Those who use UTC as intended shouldn't have to live with the problems which will result if it is unlocked from solar time, just to keep those who made a poor choice happy.
(GMT hasn't been in use for a long time, although most people use the term interchangeably with UTC).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I'm one of the biggest advocates for the base 12 (or 16) number system, but if we have to keep with base 10 for now, then it would obviously make sense to have time as base 10 also to keep things standard.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
"like the old telephone time service." Ah, UL3-1212. Haven't thought about that in a long...um...time. For the 'new-time' perhaps we could use: U812 or Fi1U12.
A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two is never sure.
The situation can be explained in three pictures.
Using already-deployed code, here is one way to solve the problems.
The old system will end and all new one will start up at the same time with big changes.
The ease of conversion is more when converting compound units. A newton is a kg m/second^2. A Joule is a Newton applied over a meter = kg m^2/second^2. A Watt is a Joule used every second = kg m^2/second^3.
American units have the pound, which is a slug foot /second^2. Except no one uses the slug, so it has to be pound-force = pound mass * 32.2 ft/second ^2. Energy? Sometimes they use foot-pound which is easy enough, but other areas we use kilowatt-hour, or BTU (defined from the heat capacity of water). Power is defined in either kilowatts or horsepower (defined via watts). Air conditioners are rated by BTU (actually BTU/hour, but that's not the way they're advertised).
I agree, 10 doesn't work so well, but 1 works great for time if you consider one rotation of Earth. At .500000 Greenwich would be through one half rotation. If you told someone to meet up in 2 and a half days you know how many time units it is already... (hint: 2.5)
I actually wrote a JavaScript clock for my desktop that uses UTC time converted to decimal for Earth rotations.
I will disagree that 12 is a reasonable number though. Sixteen I can see, but twelve does not evenly halve out to a round number. 12/2 = 6/2 = 3/2 = 1.5
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Time conversion is complicated because the universe is complicated. The time it takes to orbit around the sun isn't a nice even multiple of the amount of time it takes for the earth rotate, or any subdivision of that day. It isn't even constant as the drag of the moon and the shifting of the tectonic plates all affect the rate at which the earth rotates.
Over time we have developed many different ways of measuring time, each of which have their own advantages and disadvantages depending on the application. TIA and GPS time are both useful for applications where having a continuous scale is more important that exact accuracy. UTC was devised to keep the time in sync with the motion of the earth. That is it's purpose. By removing the leaps seconds, you remove any advantage it provides over TIA, and it becomes a redundant pointless time system.
Furthermore, it won't make software easier, because it will still have to account for the times in the past where leap seconds were inserted. More so, all local times are based on UTC and they add their own discontinuities, which have to be tracked using databases, so it's not like you are removing the need to maintain such databases; you just eliminated one entry in it.
As Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler". This is a case of oversimplifying for no good reason.
Oh, I understand the principle. The thing is that I haven't had any reason to do those types of unit conversions since I got out of school, and I'm willing to bet that goes for almost everyone else. Those who do (scientists and engineers, mostly), ought to be using metric in their work, no argument there, but the customary units that are used in other contexts doesn't matter all that much.
I am aware that in some fields of engineering they still use traditional units. And yes, that's beyond stupid.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
"We know that the human race is not sufficiently advanced because they have not yet converted to a base-6 system of enumeration."
:T:R:A:N:S:
Being a power of two is not of as much use as is being an even multiple of 2, 3, 4, and 6, giving you many possible factors to divide evenly by.
No comment.
Hate to tell you, but metric is the 'customary' system pretty much everywhere but the USA and Libya.
Now that you mention it, I've always considered base-2 or 16 to be rather useful for dealing with computers. As long as we're rearranging things, let's pick a base and put everything in it. I say 16. We can learn to count on our non-thumb knuckles and toes. We'll be a race of super geniuses, etc.
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and my clock that syncs to NIST's WWVb transmitter? i seen no mention of it in the PDF
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
But what's the point of dividing a day into three or six parts? I can see 2 and 4 (half and quarter day) but I don't know many people who think in third or sixth of days.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Oh groan, best use of that tag on /. so far.
MilkMiruku
I know that we can keep time much more accurate using atomic time.
My questions is, why on earth would we want to? I mean that literally. We live on earth. The earths travel rotation around the sun and the rotation the earth does each day is what is relevant to our lives.
We plant our crops according to the seasons. We wake up because the sun shines. Why should our system of time directly reflect the way we live our lives?
16 is perfect, because it fits in nicely with Time Cube theory: Cubed Earth has 4 Days within simultaneous rotation!
People deal with money every day, decimals are not out of the ordinary or overly complex to divide: ... that's just odd in a "base 10 world." 1/4 == .25)
1/2 = $.50
1/4 (Quarter) = $.25 (Opposed to one quarter hour which is now 15 minutes
...change the length of a second.
But what's the point of dividing a day into three or six parts? I can see 2 and 4 (half and quarter day) but I don't know many people who think in third or sixth of days.
The standard work day is 8 hours, 1/3 of a day. Most shift workers think all the time in third and sixths of a day.
Eric
Hate to tell you, but metric is the 'customary' system pretty much everywhere but the USA and Libya.
that's actually the USA, Liberia, and Myanmar chief.
plus, in america we use actually both systems depending on what we're doing, which is vastly superior to only knowing one or the other. just one more reason america is on top~
Shift workers think 8 hours, not 1/3 days. I'd even argue that a majority of those don't even account for those as 8 hour days but as start and end times. It's a subtle distinction, but I think a very important one. Using any arbitrary timescale you can still come up with a set of time that you have to work. For the start/end timers all they need is a time to start. For the hourly, all they are looking for is a number of time units to meet.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
12 does halve out to a round number! Six, as you suggested. Divide any number by two enough times and you'll end up with a fraction. However, dividing by two is just as random as counting by 12. Everyone seems to think base-X is a poor system but no one is explaining why. What are the qualities by which we're rating counting systems? I think we should count from 5 to -1. It seems to work well for the comments on this site.
If you want to read it for yourself: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1106.3141v1
Quoting the last line: "Will deliberations at the ITU-R Radiocommunication Assembly in January 2012 resolve or cloud these issues?"
This is a committee to review the standard. Nothing is going to change without proposals. Those come long AFTER the review. Then there's the discussion process. Eventually it may make it to being a standard. Then people have time to implement it.
Cheers,
Ehud
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/06/25/1528216/Long-Now-Clock-Advances-With-Bezos-Cash
The requirement for that clock has been to stay working for 10000 years,
so it's natural to choose to skip time produced by a committee...
What makes you think that I (and anyone who reads /.) don't know that?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
The current time values are hard to use in calculations. Calculations for pay, calculations for project times, calculations for just about anything with direct ties to time. At their level it's easy to deal with but converting the number to another level requires that you remember a set of numbers that have no other meaning but that. (ie: 1440 for minutes in a day)
In our current system: it's 24 units, then 12, then 60, then 60, then 1000. There's no consistency. If you wanted to find the hours in a day it's 24, but minutes is 1440. The two numbers have no correlation but their relation to an arbitrary time measurement.
In base 10 operations everything is divisible by 10 to get to the next precision level or by 100 if you want to convert two precision levels. There's no thinking: "Gosh, I have to multiply this hour by 24, then 60 then add the current minutes to get the time in total minutes." If someone walked up to you in the street and said there was a sale at the store a block away starting in 178 minutes (they wouldn't... but still) you'd have to stop and think how many times 60 goes into 178, deal with remainders... Now if that same person used decimal times(.123), you could simply look at your watch and add 0.12 to the current time and know roughly when it started without having to convert the minutes to hours. It's much simpler to solve the answer in your head if all your precision units are consistent.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I think we should do everything in base 60 since it is a round multiple of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 , so it's three factors better than base 10.
The next step would add 7 as a factor, and we sure wouldn't want to try to base our technological civilization on that! (do the math, be, um, enlightened...)
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Some cats get it man, they think it is a circle, but that's not even it man. What it is, man is a sphere. The most perfect sphere if ever there was one man, it's beautiful. There is no back or forward, past, present, or future, everything is all the time, everywhere, you just have to feel it man. That's why I don't wear a watch...
*puff* *puff* *cough*
Then I'd multiple by some power of ten two closest to a human second or year to derive the planck-second or planck-year.
So that's why Jetson was complaining about the 2 hour work day... lol. In any case a 10 hour day wouldn't make much sense, hours would be too long, and 100 would be too many hours in a day, but would be close to equivalent to a quarter hour...
cycle == 1 season rotation (year)
day == 1 planet rotation (approximate)
arn == 1/10 (2.4 hours) day
centarn=1/100 of an arn (1.44 minutes)
microt=1/100 of an centiarn (0.864 seconds)
Some names thanks to farscape.. though microt in this decimal notation is about half a microt on the show.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1106.3141v1
The fact that you referred to the imperial system as 'customary' in your comment. It is not for the great majority of the world, and there is nothing that makes it any better than metric for someone who doesn't know either system already.
Rename it to the Stardate Calendar, and trekkie geeks everywhere will rejoice while dictating their captains log in their mom's basement.
Search for alternative sources to paywalled content, learn how to deal with pageviews-harvesting blogs, post link.
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p.s. Thanks for the link...
This is all an elaborate excuse to have stores begin Christmas earlier each year.
I will disagree that 12 is a reasonable number though. Sixteen I can see, but twelve does not evenly halve out to a round number.
12 does evenly halve-out, but 16 does not evenly third-out. 16 is great for computers, because it's a power of two. In everyday human usage, taking thirds is very common and not well-supported by base-10 or base-16.
What's a third of an hour?
My God, it's Full of Source!
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If we're going to think of the children, think of what they will be doing in the future instead of the past. We should switch to base 16 since that makes it easiest to work with computers.
Besides, it doesn't matter if there are 24 or 10 or 64 hours in a day. Real geeks use seconds. As in, "I'll see you at 28,800 seconds sharp. Don't be late, we've got to finish before my meeting at 39,600."
The problem is that nobody uses thirds of an day/hour/minute. They talk in hours/minutes/seconds, respectively. The same argument applies from this post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2277666&cid=36602144
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Sorry, meant this post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2277666&cid=36601332 but the above also applies to the complexity of the current system.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
just one more reason america is on top~
On top of what? 'Highest unemployment rate' lists? 'Worst health care in developed nations' lists? 'Highest prison rates per capita' lists?
Oh, nevermind. America! Boo-yeah! We're number one!
"...about the only units that I convert between on a regular basis is ... time, "
You might want to try Frink, which specializes in units conversion, including some very sophisticated time functions and unusual units. (Search in the latter link for "Astronomical time measurements"). It handles UTC, Dynamical Time, International Atomic Time (TAI), GPS time, leap seconds, can do correct date arithmetic even across the 1BC -1AD and Julian-Gregorian gaps, and can do time-zone conversions across the date line, e.g.:
now[]
AD 2011-06-28 PM 04:37:05.787 (Tue) Eastern Daylight Time
now[] -> Guam
AD 2011-06-29 AM 06:37:14.543 (Wed) Chamorro Standard Time
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Why would it work more poorly for time than for distance or anything else?
Because with base 10 you'd be up to your ears in fractions all day (thirds of an hour, quarter hours, etc.). In base-12 fractions aren't required for everyday use.
A day is (12^3 * 5^2 * 2) seconds long. You can describe earth's 4-year orbital cycle with respect to its rotation with only one constant:
(12^4 * 5^2 * 243.5) seconds
and that will be accurate within the leap-second variation being discussed here.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This gentleman may need to revise his theory. http://www.timecube.com/ NSFW due to some naughty language
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Time is measured in sexagesimal fractions for the same reason that longitude is - they are both representations of angles.
TAI (also on the chopping block) and other interval timescales are appropriately represented as an open-ended count of seconds since some defining epoch.
UTC, as a type of Universal Time, that is time-of-day, represents the (mean) angle of the Sun in the sky.
Clocks report time-of-day, Universal Time, UTC - because vast numbers of human activities are diurnal. A sexagesimal representation is appropriate.
Chronometers - a different kind of timepiece - report precise intervals. A numerical count is appropriate.
The problem arises in converting between one and the other while making overly-simplistic assumptions about the interface design and underlying project requirements.
"What's a third of an hour?"
Depends on if you're asking someone who can (still) read an analog watch or not.
Analog watch literate: 20 minutes.
Digital only: 0.333... hours.
just sayin'
The problem is that nobody uses thirds of an day/hour/minute.
There could be thousands of counter-examples to this, but just one for the sake of illustration:
I have a three-act show to put on in a 1-hour timeslot - how long should each act be?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Each one would be .03 with a .003 intermission. .0003 is so insignificant it doesn't matter.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Because with base 10 you'd be up to your ears in fractions all day
Yeah, 1/10, 3/10. 7/10. Oh the horrors.
The only reason people are comfortable with nutty base-12 stuff is it was easier before decimals were considered normal. Now that we have decimals as common, there is no more need for stupid bases. Though personally, I wish we'd ended up with base 16 rather than base 10 or base 12. Then we'd have no conversions between machine code and human numbers.
Learn to love Alaska
But 12 isn't evenly divisible by 7. When randomly asserting divisors are desirable in the age of decimals, you might as well get them all.
I've moved on to decimal. I don't care what it is and isn't divisible by.
Learn to love Alaska
I have a three-act show to put on in a 1-hour timeslot - how long should each act be?
0.333 hours (assuming no intermission, you slave driver).
Learn to love Alaska
Try re-reading my comment. I specifically chose the word "customary" because it doesn't matter what the commonly used system is; those who actually are doing frequent unit conversions ought to be using metric anyway.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
There are two links in the summary.
The american scientist isn't free.
But arxiv has a PDF-only copy for free.
(AFAIK the last proof remains the intellectual property of the authors, the journal only own the final version as it appears in print. So the authors can upload this PDF on arxiv)
So stop complaining and use the other link. ;-)
Or didn't you even read TFS ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
How caveman do you think Libya is? They're on metric too.
AFAIK the only non-US nations de jure using imperial are Liberia and Burma.
Sent from my PDP-11
Um ... don't you ever use the phases "half past ten" or "quarter to six"?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
You don't need fractions though? That's the point of metric?
A day is 100 centidays long.
Go to work at 37.5cd (375millidays) aka 9h... high noon at .5d / 5dd / 50cd. So take your half hour lunch ( 2 centiday lunch). Come back to the office at 52cd Leave work at 71cd (17h). supper at 75cd (18h). etc. The 11oclock news is now on at 958md. They'd probably make it a nice number like .95day. "Late news nine five".
Realistically these would end up being aligned with rounder numbers. Just like no one has an official shift start at 9:13.
1 centiday is roughly 15m (14.4m), so 4 centidays is almost an hour. So instead of meeting someone in an hour or 15m, you meet them in 4 cents, or a cent...
That all seems very weird but I'm sure it would be perfectly natural once adapted to, I would think. Just typing it up is a bit of a mindfuck, but I don't think people born into it would question it any more than they question our current time system.
The real problem is that there are 3600 seconds in a day, so you'd probably want to redefine a second as being 10 microdays (which is 864ms), which would break every other unit pretty much.
Leap seconds and that too. but yeah, that's what I've got right now.
Sent from my PDP-11
UTC redfined as $(($(date '+%s') + $leapseconds))
A sphere? Don't you mean a ball?
On a more serious note, I submit that the arrow of time is a local anisomorphy in the phase-space of possible worlds, from less entropic ones to more entropic ones, in which case it really may be a sphere, or really a hypersphere, centered on the nearest local entropic minimum in the aforementioned phase-space.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Astronomers have known for a long time that the earth's rotation is slowing, primarily an effect caused by the moon and sun dragging on the tidal bulge they raise not only in the oceans but also in the earth's crust. To keep Universal Time (Coordinated) or UTC within 0.5 seconds of mean solar time, UTC is adjusted by adding one second to the last minute at the end of a day (the "leap second"). Computer software that must deal with uniform minutes should use International Atomic Time (TAI [from the French acronym]) and include algorithms to convert between UTC and TAI.
Such software to deal automatically with leap seconds and the difference between TAI and UTC existed at least as early as 1969, when the adjustment of UTC involved not whole seconds but fractions of a second and when a UTC second was not even equal to a TAI second. Today, only whole leap seconds occur; and a UTC clock ticks at the same rate and on the same instant as a TAI clock. The difference is that, at the instant when a TAI clock reads 10:23:47 a UTC clock will read 10:23:13.
What happened is that the slowing of the earth's rotation itself decreased such that several years elapsed without any leap seconds. Between the 1 July 1983 leap second and the 1 January 1990 leap second, only two other leap seconds occurred. In the ten years between the 1 January 1999 leap second and the 1 January 2010 leap second, there was only one other leap second. Before 1983, leap seconds occurred every year or two.
After 1983, too many people -- astronomers, horologists, and especially computer software engineers -- became lazy. Knowledge that was well used 40 years ago was forgotten. Critical software systems broke when they could not handle a 61-second minute. These systems were designed, tested, and put to use during the gaps between leap seconds. Now, rather than correct the software, the plan is to redefine the environment. Unfortunately, much software still requires knowledge of mean solar time, including the software for operating such space satellites as the GPS sytem despite the fact that GPS time itself does not use UTC or leap seconds.
This is all so similar to the Y2K fiasco.
I think we should standardize on the timecube.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
10 is an arbitrary base and works poorly for time. Earth time works very well in Base-12, which is what we have now.
If you want to think of the children, the Egyptians and Babylonians taught their children to count on the knuckles of their four non-thumb fingers. The 10-finger-number system is just an unfortunate thing that came along with arabic numerals, which are very useful.
I saw we adopt something from the UNICODE set to mean eleven and twelve. Say, they're not 1-teen and 2-teen, are they?
Why not use something like 2, or 8, or 16? Pick the frequency of some em waveform emitted by some nuclear element as the primary basis on which to define a second. Have 64 of these newly graded seconds define a minute, 64 minutes define an hour, and 32 or 16 hours define a day.
Right now, you have a day as 60x60x24 = 86,499 seconds. With the new definition, you will have 131,072 seconds. In other words, a shorter second, but one that gives a day 32 hours. In other words, split the day into 131,072 'seconds', and define the second to be certain number of times the frequency of that particular radioactive waveform.
Oh, and come up w/ a new numbering system altogether. Instead of base 10, do base 16. Already we have hexadecimal extensions of A-F, but I suggest that instead of these, we add 6 new numerals to denote them: flipped 3, 4, 6, 7, 9 & a sideways 2 or 5. Use them, in that order, to denote A-F.
Then redefine all weights & measures to this new system. It'll be best for computers, that will no longer have to go from binary to bcd or vice versa, and make things so much easier. No need to complain about following metric, or Imperial or anything else NIH. Use this system, on the grounds that it's the most natural and mathematical/scientific way to organize numbers.
All we need to do is adjust the orbit and rotation of the earth to convenient metric values. It could be calibrated every year using nuclear weapons, as in the move "The Day the Earth Caught Fire".
So, your metric time would be in seconds right? You can talk about kiloseconds all you like, doesn't matter to me.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Check out hexadecimal time in wikipedia.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.