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You Can Look Forward To 8 More Years of Leap Second Problems (cio.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the leap-groundhog-saw-his-shadow dept.

itwbennett writes: As previously discussed here, the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) met "for nearly the entire month of November, and one of the hot-button issues [was] what to do about the leap second." But, as they did at the 2012 conference, the WRC voted to postpone the decision — not just until the next WRC in 2019, but until the one after, in 2023, while the International Telecommunication Union conducts further studies into the impact of tinkering with the definition of Coordinated Universal Time.

1 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is stupid ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We use it for important things like navigation and timekeeping, and knowing when the hell things like eclipses, sun flares, high tides, and comets might happen ... or that asteroid which might kill us.

    I'm a professional astronomer, who occasionally needs to time things to sub-second precision over multiple years - and the leap second is, to me, nothing but a pain in the arse. Let's run down your list:

      * "navigation" - No one navigates by the sun and stars any more - at least, certainly no one who needs sub-second precision.

      * "timekeeping" - Atomic clocks keep time irrespective of the sun.

      * "eclipses" - Eclipses don't care whether the sun's at the meridian or not: they only care about the relative position of the sun and the moon, which you can calculate perfectly easily with an arbitrary time standard.

      * "sun flares" - Solar flares don't care whether the sun's at the meridian or not.

      * "high tides" - The sun makes a small contribution to the tides (which are dominated by the moon), so the leap second *does* help you keep track of this contribution - but who the hell needs to know the high tide to the nearest second?

      * "comets" - Comets don't care if the sun is at the meridian or not.

      * "that asteroid which might kill us" - That asteroid doesn't care if the sun is at the meridian or not - but there *is* a chance that someone might miscalculate its orbit and not realise that it's going to kill us, because there was a bug in their code dealing with leap seconds.

    So, this is something that genuinely puzzles me: who actually *wants* leap seconds? You seem to think that I should want them, but I certainly don't.