I didn't get a vote. Did you?
The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
151–160 of 456 posts
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#152There has been a proposal in the 1950s to the UN by a German mathematician to replace the current calendar by a decimal-based system, in which leap YEARS are not needed either: everything would be divisible by 100. I can't remember where I heard this from, but the anecdote goes he got a reply saying thanks for the proposal, but it is not feasible to introduce such a massive change globally, irrespective of the propos…
That is mixing up quite a few different things. World Calendar [1] was proposed in League of Nations/United Nations, but it was created by US person. There was slightly earlier proposal, International Fixed Calendar[2] from British person that also had some popularity. Neither of these were decimal calendars though, that is something from French revolution [3], and even they did not really manage to make it very decimal.
Afaik the most vocal opposition to reforms came from the US
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Calendar
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#153How is this supposed to work? The rotation of the earth is not a constant. So we either scrap UT1 ("the atomic clock") or UTC ("the calendar"). Neither sound like an actual option. The latter would imply that at some (far off) point in the future you wake up at like 10pm as UTC and UT1 are now entirely mismatched (you may as well get rid of all time zones at that point).
I propose waiting a thousand years, so that the difference builds up to an hour, and then handle the adjustment as part of the daylight savings reform, which should just about have worked its way through the U.S. Congress and the EU institutions by then.
No. You’d need to actually change all the calendars. for example, an event recorded as happening at UTC 0 doesn’t get changed by a time zone change. And yet the hour you’ve accumulated is a “real” hour that’s accumulated in the number of seconds you think has elapsed since 0. You could of course keep track of when those leap seconds applied but now you have to have an almanac to compute the difference between two time stamps to account for all the smearing.
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#154Currently 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…
I've always thought that the best way would just have leap seconds every six months, and have it be ± 1 second no matter what - so sometimes you'd go back a second twice in a row, and then go forward a second to get back to correct. That'd test all the software paths.
Better make it every other day rather than every six months.
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pretty sure UTC is monotonic too, its unix timestamps that really are the true mess
[deleted]
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pretty sure UTC is monotonic too, its unix timestamps that really are the true mess
Wrong. The very topic of this discussion, leap seconds, are non-monotonic adjustments to UTC.
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#157Currently 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…
Indeed; the converse would be to add (or remove) micro-leapseconds in order to keep accurate time. That way it would happen so often that the code would get tested and we'd have working implementations (maybe we could fix the traditional Apple issues with leap years at the same time).
I’m pretty sure we would get bugs whenever the accumulated micro-leapseconds would reach a full second.
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#158Currently 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…
Nobody really cares about clocks being celestially "off" by a minute either. So this isn't a once-a-century thing, it's adding-a-leap-15-minutes-once-a-millenia issue.
The rate accelerates long term, but yeah.
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#159> Or we could even decouple our sense of time from the Sun entirely, to create a single world time zone in which different countries see the Sun overhead at different times of day or night. A very interesting idea, but probably much too progressive.
I'm for this. Get rid of timezones, AM, PM, DST, leap years, seconds, all of it! Imagine having to know just one time. It takes a bit to wrap your head around. But only because we've accepted all the confusion for so long. The sun is still going to be "up" in one part of the world and "down" in another. The little numbers on your clock don't change that. Why can't it be the same little numbers everywhere?
At that point you may as well go with beats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#160Currently 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 would we ever need a leap minute? Just let time zones drift. Unless you happen to be at the exact longitude for which your time zone is correct, the sun's not at its highest point in the sky for you at exactly noon anyway. Eventually, thousands of years from now when time has drifted by an hour or more (assuming modern technological civilization even still exists by then), each jurisdiction can just change their…
The last part is right and is also why we have this problem.
Leap seconds are an architectural blunder that always belonged in the abstraction layer that lines up the sun with the rotation of earth (the time zone abstraction). It never belonged in the part that counts seconds.