Earlier quoted context omitted.
The International Earth Rotation Service is possibly my favorite name for an international bureaucracy. It give me visions of a Giant Control Lever extending deep into the Earth, with the labels Faster and Slower .
You can actually slow down or speed up the planet's rotation with a big switch. |_ open switch, slower __ closed switch faster You can also do it yourself by standing up or laying down
Celestial Reference Frame Department
51–58 of 58 posts
Re: Celestial Reference Frame Department
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> These are the people behind leap seconds. So they are my enemies
You have been lied to… your true enemies are the ones that continue to build monotonic systems on top of non monotonic time scales… Join us in the Temps Atomic International! TAI is the one true timescale. Computers should be using TAI and converting to UTC when humans want to see a local human time. My sincere belief is this was a bigger mistake than null, bigger than all the Y2K “we stored the year as 2 digits” stu…
Re: Celestial Reference Frame Department
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
GPS never had leap seconds. Your hell is imaginary. It is a myth and a lie perpetrated by those that never looked beyond the convenient lie to children that is UTC and tried to understand the true nature of timekeeping. GPS Time signal = TAI minus 19 seconds https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/90844
Actually it’s a bit more complicated than that. As well as the integer number of seconds between GPS time and UTC, the GPS signal includes a small linear correction (rate and phase) that gives you a more precise version of UTC(USNO). So to get something like TAI from GPS time you must also apply the rate and phase correction. But that still isn’t TAI as such, because TAI is only defined after the fact, in the form of…
Early programmers totally fucked up using UTC instead of TAI which as a monotonic count of seconds is a far more accurate representation of how computers keep track of time via continuous oscillation counters than any approximation of UTC until we developed widespread network synchronized NTP based systems and began to use UTC via these, and even then its not a really good representation because all these systems want to work with clean contiguous "one second is one second" time keeping, which is what monotonic time scales are, they inherently are this. So the choice of using a non-monotonic time scale on top of hardware that keeps time monotonically was flawed from the start.
We can get into the Sidereal time, Ephemeris time, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, UT, TT, ERA, DUT1, MTC (Marian Co-ordinated Time), and what the difference is between an instance and an interval that represents a specific moment in time with an any temporal uncertainty attached... I do freely admit I'm a total unrepentant geek about this sort of thing, the only reason I don't own an atomic clock is because I just cant justify the few grand to buy one (cheapest I've seen is $1.5kAUD for an DIY module from Microsemi) when I know how precise my GPS based Stratum 0 embedded Linux NTP server is... Heck the IERS Bulletin emails are some of the only automated emails I look forward to and open up with a little glee, finding out what's up with the literal rotation of the planet, neatly dropped in my inbox!
But as nerds who already know a bunch of metrology/timekeeping stuff (which I am assuming from your comment) we could launch ourselves down the rabbit hole, and hope the readers can keep up, or as I've tried to with my comments here (particularly with the slightly whimsical choice of wordplay)... Try and give causal nerds who have only just tripped over the very idea that there is a better timescale that computers should be using instead of UTC some idea where to begin reading, and to wash away some of the false truths (like that GPS has leap seconds) and while technically TAI might not be easy for computers to use due to the retroactively corrected nature of it... at the end of the day all timekeeping is subject to measurement error, approximation, and correction either due to or in correlation with external sources, and thus because we only periodically correct computers to UTC mostly (on average) between 1hr to 1day via NTP depending on OS and preferences, correcting a monotonic system clock to the daily correlated and corrected TAI would be infinitely better due to eliminating all the leap second complaints, than repeatedly correcting the system clock to UTC and continuing to have the leap second problem, because UTC has a place in the timekeeping world a place that its miss-use by computers has now put in jeopardy (the calls driven by tech companies to fix UTC and have no more leap seconds).
Prior to the invention of NTP, system administrators would have just corrected it to TAI manually, and done so just as accurately as we would have corrected it to UTC, so arguments like "it would be harder to use TAI than UTC" have honestly never been true, its really just a problem of awareness and now that we're in a world where system firmware is broadly speaking designed to keep time via UTC and thus when you interrogate "system time" you get UTC, everything built up from this layer is "wrong" so its a bootstrapping problem on the level of switching to IPv6, yes its technically better, but none of the hardware supports it and so why bother when I can just keep hacking away at UTC/IPv4... except there's no UTC scarcity to drive any sort of adoption, so all that can be done is to proselytize the benefits of TAI to the best of ones ability and hope that eventually it makes a difference.
Re: Celestial Reference Frame Department
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have been lied to… your true enemies are the ones that continue to build monotonic systems on top of non monotonic time scales… Join us in the Temps Atomic International! TAI is the one true timescale. Computers should be using TAI and converting to UTC when humans want to see a local human time. My sincere belief is this was a bigger mistake than null, bigger than all the Y2K “we stored the year as 2 digits” stu…
I would love to run TAI on my devices. But where can I find a public NTP server that offers TAI, or a GPS module that gives the same? Do these exist? Or is this the wrong approach?
So while you can design software to record things in TAI, and if you build your own hardware and firmware use TAI on that hardware and firmware... at a normal day to day level you can't really switch... but you can join the slowly growing collection of educated and aware people that appreciate the UTC/TAI mismatch in our software systems and push in the correct direction. The arguments about freezing UTC and not adding any more leap seconds to it are on the face of it, just stupid, we have GPS time which is fixed to TAI, we have TAI itself... we don't need to fundamentally change UTC just because we fucked up all the computers but just don't want to fix them properly. This is one time where counter to the Simpson's meme, the children are in fact wrong. UTC is harder for the computers to use, and that's because UTC was the wrong choice, so the answer is to stop having the damn computers use UTC as the internal time representation and switch to having them use an appropriate internal time representation.
Re: Celestial Reference Frame Department
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can actually slow down or speed up the planet's rotation with a big switch. |_ open switch, slower __ closed switch faster You can also do it yourself by standing up or laying down
What happened to the rotation rate around the beginning of 2019, to cause the big change in the slope of the UT1-UTC line ( https://crf.usno.navy.mil/ut1-utc )? After adding 5 leap seconds in 11 years, no leap seconds have been added or subtracted since the end of 2016.
Re: Celestial Reference Frame Department
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The GPS-only clock source entered the room… I.e. most aircraft, spacecraft, electrical infrastructure, cell towers, etc. Welcome straight back to “what do we do with the leap second?” hell. Unfortunately none of the interfaces between parties agree on TAI. It’s stupid GPS time or UTC.
GPS never had leap seconds. Your hell is imaginary. It is a myth and a lie perpetrated by those that never looked beyond the convenient lie to children that is UTC and tried to understand the true nature of timekeeping. GPS Time signal = TAI minus 19 seconds https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/90844
Getting a UTC time from GPS involves the leap second and during the event agreeing how how it’s implemented. Some systems smear, some double tick a 0 at midnight, it’s a disaster.
I completely agree that any coordination should be TAI. But that’s not the world we have to interface with unfortunately.
This hell isn’t imaginary, I’m speaking from experience of seeing stuff fall out of sync on the last leap second due to some systems using GPS with no smear and others using NTP to a source that smears.
Re: Celestial Reference Frame Department
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can actually slow down or speed up the planet's rotation with a big switch. |_ open switch, slower __ closed switch faster You can also do it yourself by standing up or laying down
What happened to the rotation rate around the beginning of 2019, to cause the big change in the slope of the UT1-UTC line ( https://crf.usno.navy.mil/ut1-utc )? After adding 5 leap seconds in 11 years, no leap seconds have been added or subtracted since the end of 2016.
This kind of rate change is referred to as a “decadal variation”, because the changes last ~decade(s). They seem to be due to activity in the earth’s mantle, but it is all very poorly understood.
I wrote about this three years ago: https://dotat.at/@/2020-11-13-leap-second-hiatus.html
Re: Celestial Reference Frame Department
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would love to run TAI on my devices. But where can I find a public NTP server that offers TAI, or a GPS module that gives the same? Do these exist? Or is this the wrong approach?
As mentioned in a reply to a sibling comment. GPS time is (to a human relevant usable level of accuracy) TAI minus 19 seconds. The issue is that you can't really "run TAI" on something, most firmware isn't designed to keep track of time this way and so expects to be working with UTC, the differences are subtle and basically boil down to "has no leap seconds and requires some math to accommodate this fact" and "expect…