51–60 of 259 posts
Does this mean the negative leap second isn't happening anymore?
Not anymore forever. We’re just not adding one for this year. We might need one next year, we might not. It all depends on the Earth’s rotation and orbit
we were all waiting for the negative leap second to finally happen - but cowards got too afraid
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It’s a huge problem. The most common approach to address it is called smearing; the duration of each second for a 24 hour period ahead of the “leap” is adjusted. For strict ordering systems this works as each device maintains time sync with the global clock, the duration of a clock cycle is just slightly different. I think this was in the original Spanner paper, actually. Some rare systems use monotonic oscillator se…
I wonder if that's what electricity producers do? If you are selling 50 or 60 Hz service, an extra second here or there must really mess things up.
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I wonder if that's what electricity producers do? If you are selling 50 or 60 Hz service, an extra second here or there must really mess things up.
Clocks used to be able to use the 60Hz cycle to track time, and grid providers would run slightly slow or fast ("time error correction") to get back into sync. A leap second would just be part of this. I believe in the US this error correction has been discontinued in the East and in Texas, but is still done in the West for some kind of non-clock "inadvertent interchange" reasons I don't understand.
"To authorities responsible for the measurement and distribution of time" is just the best preamble ever.
They should call themselves Time Lords
I enjoy how Chrome asks me if I want to auto translate from German to English. Where did it get German from? It's French!
Probably from the "Content-Language: de" header
> Dieser URL wird nicht beantwortet. Bitte wenden Sie sich mit Ihrer Anfrage an das Bundesamt fuer Kartographie und Geodaesie.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Earth_Rotation_a...
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Yes, all of those and more. Our measurement precision is much better than the year-to-year first and second derivatives of day length. https://datacenter.iers.org/singlePlot.php?plotname=Bulletin... has the most relevant plot to this; the vertical jumps reflect leap seconds. (IERS has other plots for other dimensions of rotation, but I like this one.)
Very interesting, I wonder what happened in 2020 that causes the rotational speed to start drifting the other way? Pandemic -> more people working from home -> less people in tall office buildings -> faster rotation (like a skater pulling in their arms). Probably not remotely true but it would be funny.
My best guess would be it's somehow related to water distribution? More water going into the atmosphere? Glaciers growing (unlikely)? Did multiple huge water reservoirs go into service and get filled up over the summer months?
Hear me out. We can just mount jet engines along the equator and rotate them 180 to gain or lose time. And then connect them to my snooze button.
They should have a global holiday to celebrate the people who maintain time/date related code in OS kernels that keeps the world from imploding.
As one HN comment said years ago: I feel leap seconds have always lived in the wrong abstraction layer. They should live in the same abstraction layer that does leap days and daylight savings: the time zones.
The changes in Earth's rotational speed that leap seconds help account for affect the whole globe. Why shouldn't the effects be noted in the global time standard?
The point is that it's weird that we handle a day every 4 years off in a different way to a couple of second being off.
Hear me out. We can just mount jet engines along the equator and rotate them 180 to gain or lose time. And then connect them to my snooze button.