> Do normal humans publish "waking hours"? Not typically. I believe I just fell in love with that idea. If this would become a social norm people would maybe stop trying to reach me in the morning. And I would know if it's too late to call others.
This can indeed happen when a significant portion of humanity lives in the space, and can trigger the biggest change to how we keep date and time.
No need to wait that long - plenty of incoming email has "My working days are: " in their footer. I'm sure time can be added there too
> The CGPM — which also oversees the international system of units (SI) — has proposed that no leap second should be added for at least a century, allowing UT1 and UTC to slide out of sync by about 1 minute. So, in one century, we'll get 1 minute's worth of drift. Recall that we all share the same clock within timezones, and 1 minute of drift between atomic & solar clocks is the equivalent of traveling 1/60th of your…
The problem is mostly (or so I’ve heard) that the drift is relevant for astronomical applications, and they rely on time dissemination which is done in UTC. If UTC decides to start deviating from TAI by dropping leap seconds, those applications will be in trouble. I’m sure that the problem is overblown, but this is the reasoning that was put forward in the past.
But leap seconds hose up astronomical applications too. They all start with TAI and then apply corrections as needed. There are lots more corrections than leap seconds, but they're applied proportionally, not as leaps.
Leap seconds are a solution in search of a problem.
> Yah, one second doesn't matter, but it builds up. I don't think it's that big of a deal; do you really care what the perception of "11 in the morning" is for someone 1,000 years ago? This kind of thing is pretty cultural anyway, and a slow drift over a thousands of years doesn't really matter. The main reason we have the "new" Gregorian calendar is because of religious reasons, not because people were having huge p…
Religion was only half the reason for the Gregorian calendar reform. Church and state, being interlinked and intertwined, the civil calendar was gradually slipping away from correct calibration with the equinoxes and thus the seasons. So it was important for farmers and mariners and politicians to all have a reliable calendar that matched what the Earth was actually going through. It just so happened that the religio…
That was I was told in history lesson, too, but I'm not so sure that was all that important of a reason, otherwise it wouldn't have taken hundreds of years for people to adopt the new calendar. The drift is so slow that a week more or less over a period of 1,000 years is easily something that can slowly be adjusted to by farmers, politicians, and the like (unlike, say, the Roman calendar before Caesar reformed it which drifted by several days every year).
Our current calendar was introduced in 1582, 440 years ago [0].
We add a leap second about every 1.5 years [1].
That means in the time since our calendar was invented, we've added less than 5 minutes to our time.
Would anyone notice if noon arrived 5 minutes earlier over the course of 500 years? Especially since the position of the sun varies orders of magnitude more than that simply based on season?
Maybe we could all just agree to add 10 minutes in 3022. If we haven't switched calendars again.
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…
> I'm not sure what the moral is here
I think the moral is that it'd be a lot easier if we could just stop messing with the clocks, or at least push more technical things towards only caring about a closest-to-a-global-high-precision-monotonic-clock-as-relativity-allows rather than worrying about what the clocks on the walls say, which is more a personal matter of how much you care or don't where the sun is in the sky at 12:00:00.000.
I now realized that the parent meant everything should have been TAI from the beginning, which is indeed a valid take. We can't switch to TAI today only because we are already using UTC. Original comment: Only those who never tried to actually use TAI yourself can claim that you can use TAI instead of UTC without a problem.
Just have 37 leap seconds to bring UTC into sync with TAI, then lock them together. That won't break anything...
Yes, that's what the CGPM eventually decided to do because they know UTC will have to stay.