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No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

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Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#121

Post by dmurray »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #101
tialaramex wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2035 is the agreed drop dead date. Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea that they should be replaced by 2035. Nobody has agreed how to fix it, and "Just turn them off" isn't technically legal. However, "What if there were Leap hours instead?" is technically legal and of course those hours would happen in the very distant future (likely after our civilisation is gone) so it's functionally i…

On the subject of amusing British political legislation, should he defeat Nigel Farage in the resulting by-election Count Binface will not be able to wear his costume in Parliament; not only is business attire required in the House of Commons, it's specifically forbidden to wear a suit of armour there due to a law from the 14th century. For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-elect…

Quite a few MPs in Westminster already don't take their physical seats in Parliament (and never vote or address the House) because the conditions attached to doing so aren't compatible with their principles. Maybe Count Binface will be the next.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#122

Post by dmurray »

hwc wrote: post #94
tialaramex wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2035 is the agreed drop dead date. Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea that they should be replaced by 2035. Nobody has agreed how to fix it, and "Just turn them off" isn't technically legal. However, "What if there were Leap hours instead?" is technically legal and of course those hours would happen in the very distant future (likely after our civilisation is gone) so it's functionally i…

just move the prime meridian. the one we use for timekeeping doesn't have to aligh with longitude forever.

This seems like an interesting solution, even if it's absurdist at first thought. What if we just shift the steel bar in Greenwich 20 metres east or west instead of adding a leap second?

Then everything would theoretically be correct. The logical next thing to do would be to move all the time zones as well. But time zones already don't coincide with the lines of longitude in practice; they tend to follow country or internal boundaries somewhat close to the lines of longitude (but sometimes multiple hours away!). After a few thousand leap seconds, maybe one or two countries would feel it was helpful to readjust a time zone boundary to better align with solar time, but in practice this would never be the overriding reason for that decision.

You say people's GPS systems would all suddenly be wrong because they depend on locations in latitude and longitude? I don't think this is a problem either: in practice longitude and latitude are given not relative to the steel bar in Greenwich, but to per-continent geodetic datum points. This already prevents continental drift from affecting your coordinates, though a big earthquake can still mess things up.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#123

Post by mekdoonggi »

suspiciousape wrote: post #102
ortusdux wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the argument that we should have 12 months that are exactly 30 days long, and then merge whatever is left into a single timeless holiday.

I thought it was 13 months exactly 4 weeks long, which takes us to exactly 364 days

We could call the 13th month "Undecember"

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#124

Post by tialaramex »

latexr wrote: post #120
ninju wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who need more context of who the Time Lords are The Time Lords are a fictional ancient race of extraterrestrial people in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. In-universe, they hail from the planet Gallifrey and are stated to have invented time travel technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Lord

For further context, Doctor Who is a member of the species.

I think if we're being pedantic, the character's name is "The Doctor". The TV show is named "Doctor Who" but the character doesn't call themself that and a name is what something is called.

[Edited to avoid assigning a gender to a character who has had different genders]

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#126

Post by charonn0 »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #101
tialaramex wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2035 is the agreed drop dead date. Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea that they should be replaced by 2035. Nobody has agreed how to fix it, and "Just turn them off" isn't technically legal. However, "What if there were Leap hours instead?" is technically legal and of course those hours would happen in the very distant future (likely after our civilisation is gone) so it's functionally i…

On the subject of amusing British political legislation, should he defeat Nigel Farage in the resulting by-election Count Binface will not be able to wear his costume in Parliament; not only is business attire required in the House of Commons, it's specifically forbidden to wear a suit of armour there due to a law from the 14th century. For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-elect…

> Count Binface

I did not expect this to be a real person. Is he with the Standing At The Back Dressed Stupidly And Looking Stupid party?

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#127

Post by eqvinox »

AbstractH24 wrote: post #125

ELI5: How does this impact UNIX timestamps? Particularly for things that are in maintenance mode or otherwise minimally maintained. Nothing I do requires this level of precision, but certainly there are things that do.

UNIX timestamps are fully ignorant of leap seconds, i.e. pretends they don't exist. That means there can be physical seconds of time that cannot be referenced with a UNIX timestamp (when a leap second is inserted) as well as UNIX timestamps for seconds that don't exist (when a leap second is deleted).

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#128

Post by elsjaako »

dmurray wrote: post #122
hwc wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just move the prime meridian. the one we use for timekeeping doesn't have to aligh with longitude forever.

This seems like an interesting solution, even if it's absurdist at first thought. What if we just shift the steel bar in Greenwich 20 metres east or west instead of adding a leap second? Then everything would theoretically be correct. The logical next thing to do would be to move all the time zones as well. But time zones already don't coincide with the lines of longitude in practice; they tend to follow country or i…

The GPS meridian doesn't align with the steel(?) bar anyway. There's a Tom Scott video about it.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#129

Post by lanstin »

ninju wrote: post #119
TimTheTinker wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TZDB could handle it though

https://m.xkcd.com/2867/

I had not seen that. In the nineties I worked on an alerts system where you could sign up for like some sport or weather data at a certain time of day. We stored the alert times as minutes before midnight and then ran the time to trigger calculations often enough that unless you were some freak that wants weather alerts at 2 am it basically worked to send one alert each day at the appropriate time; we had a special non-OS copy of the tzdb as the users were global. One quarter I forgot to update it and everyone in Mexico City got their alerts one hour off till someone complained and I updated it. We also had data feed alerts, like score changed or stock hit x% over previous high, where the problem is some data is manually entered and can be off by a factor or two of ten from time to time. Had to be filtered. I had a lot of fun.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#130

Post by slashdave »

flippyhead wrote: post #60
delichon wrote: post #21

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.

I feel like we can all just jump at the same time. I mean, we only need a second or two, right?

Maybe a whole bunch of people can charter some planes, fill them with weight, and just travel full around the earth to where they started.
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