131–140 of 456 posts
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If we simply detonate the moon it would cease affecting the Earth's rotation, thus solving the problem.
But wouldn't the rotational speed of the earth become more erratic?
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Oh right, I confused the terminology, but the point still stands mostly.
It's a minor problem. One minute off in a hundred years is something we can all live with.
Is it important that midnight is actually midnight? I don't know. I would prefer it to be, but perhaps I can just update my knowledge on when the midnight actually is once or twice a year. Perhaps it isn't a big deal at all. But I wouldn't dare to claim that "surely there can be no problems with it".
And, yes, that kinda means I don't support the leap second removal. It wasn't great, but eventually fixing the software written by incompetent people sounds more like a solution, than breaking the existing solution and making both competent and incompetent people alike eventually come up with a new one (to abolish it as well after 100 more years).
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If you would detonate the moon, break it up into small pieces and smear them out over its orbit, tidal friction would cease. Tidal friction is a major component of the earth's rotation's slowdown.
> If you would detonate the moon, break it up into small pieces […] Close to the plot of a recent Stephenson sci-fi novel: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves
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Ok let future generations take the hit. Got ya. Selfish ...
How big of a hit is it on the future generation, they can just change their DST, which already happens every few years anyways?
Currently software has to be built to accommodate leap seconds. They happen frequently enough that you'll find out within a few years whether your software breaks when time suddenly skips forward or backward. If we kick the can down the road such that eventually we'll need to add a leap minute, we're going to end up with software that was never written to expect time to change in such a way, hasn't had a real world t…
Why bother? A calendar year is 365.242 days long... time is already off by about 3/4 of a day the year before a leap year, what does adding a second here or there really do?
Earth's rotation relative to the Sun is whole another deal.
Currently software has to be built to accommodate leap seconds. They happen frequently enough that you'll find out within a few years whether your software breaks when time suddenly skips forward or backward. If we kick the can down the road such that eventually we'll need to add a leap minute, we're going to end up with software that was never written to expect time to change in such a way, hasn't had a real world t…
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What would using TAI solve exactly? I'm unfamiliar.
Datetime storage would consist of two explicit parts: one free from leap seconds (similar to the raw timestamp you get from a GPS receiver), and description of when leap seconds happen, so that you can transform the leap-second-free timestamp into UTC. Feels like a more robust way in principle to me.
In 2015 I was working at a "fintech" company and a leap second was announced. It was scheduled for a Wednesday, unlike all others before which had happened on the weekend, when markets were closed. When the previous leap second was applied, a bunch of our Linux servers had kernel panics for some reason, so needless to say everyone was really concerned about a leap second happening during trading hours. So I was assig…
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What would using TAI solve exactly? I'm unfamiliar.
TAI is monotonic clock, and isn't adjusted for solar time of day, it could be considered universal as TAI would be the same between any 2 points, but UTC is adjusted for earths rotation, so a theoretical mars UTC would end up out of sync with earth UTC. EDIT: info below is incorrect about UTC not being monotonic, as pointed out in thread but is useful for monotonic vs non-monotonic: In UTC you can jump forward or bac…
I'm not sure how this differs much in practice from UNIX time
In 2015 I was working at a "fintech" company and a leap second was announced. It was scheduled for a Wednesday, unlike all others before which had happened on the weekend, when markets were closed. When the previous leap second was applied, a bunch of our Linux servers had kernel panics for some reason, so needless to say everyone was really concerned about a leap second happening during trading hours. So I was assig…
Sometimes the best (for some definition of best) solution to a problem is to side-step it entirely.