61–70 of 159 posts
Leap Seconds need to be abolished. The only people who need it are Astronomers. They could just use an offset. Implementing leap seconds correctly is a huge burden, for no gain. Where I live, high noon today occurs at 1:03 PM. No one is complaining that it is 3 minutes (or 63 minutes) off. It's a non-issue for 99.9% of the population.
Responding to a deleted comment: > ... the "invisible infrastructure" of the web; balancing historical accuracy with the technical need to minimize zone fragmentation is a much more complex trade-off than it appears on the surface ... The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely. At $wo…
> The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely. There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such. One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future (some future generation…
We've had 27 leapseconds in the last 54 years [1] - an average of 0.5 seconds per year.
At that rate, solar time will drift by 60 seconds over the course of 120 years. Drifting by 10 minutes will take 1200 years.
The leap hour will be in 7200 years, around year 9226.
I assumed that leap seconds could be determined algorithmically, it appears I assumed badly. This is a bit of a can of worms...
They basically are, the algorithm is something like: At the beginning of january and july, observe the difference between UT1 and UTC. If the difference is >= 0.6s, a leap second will be inserted at the end of june/december. Publish the results here: https://hpiers.obspm.fr/eoppc/bul/bulc
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely. There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such. One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future (some future generation…
> One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future We've had 27 leapseconds in the last 54 years [1] - an average of 0.5 seconds per year. At that rate, solar time will drift by 60 seconds over the course of 120 years. Drifting by 10 minutes will take 1200 years. The leap hour will be in 7200 years, around year 9226. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
7200 years ago the Neolithic revolution was still in full swing and many of the most famous megaliths like Stonehenge hadn’t even been built yet. The first real state, the Sumerian civilization, hadn’t formed yet in Mesopotamia.
Personally, I’m very comfortable making this someone else’s problems 7200 years from now. If they’re still having basic coordination issues then it’s their own damn problem.
How about a leap minute instead so we only have to worry about this when it's not a problem anymore :)? We will either hit the fermi filter or accend intelligence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely. There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such. One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future (some future generation…
IMHO the correct way to handle leap seconds would have been at the same layer as timezones, i.e. a display-only thing. Timezone databases are regularly updated, you push out leap second updates there. In the worst case, people's clocks are off by one second but all the underlying timing logic doesn't crash.
Interesting! There's a lot I don't know about this, but I know a little more now. I'll admit, I naively thought this would be more regular than it appears to be [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
They teach us Scientific Realism in school, but reality is that we are really using Instrumentalism. That said, no one wants to admit it, so contemporary science follows Falsification, where we find ways to not actually make claims about reality. (Which as an Instrumentalist/pragmatist, I love Karl Popper, its just not metaphysical truth. And that would break Popper's heart)
I can see how someone could misunderstand or forget what they're taught though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely. There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such. One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future (some future generation…
IMHO the correct way to handle leap seconds would have been at the same layer as timezones, i.e. a display-only thing. Timezone databases are regularly updated, you push out leap second updates there. In the worst case, people's clocks are off by one second but all the underlying timing logic doesn't crash.
I'm a fan but it's rare for anyone else to agree!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future We've had 27 leapseconds in the last 54 years [1] - an average of 0.5 seconds per year. At that rate, solar time will drift by 60 seconds over the course of 120 years. Drifting by 10 minutes will take 1200 years. The leap hour will be in 7200 years, around year 9226. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
> The leap hour will be in 7200 years, around year 9226. 7200 years ago the Neolithic revolution was still in full swing and many of the most famous megaliths like Stonehenge hadn’t even been built yet. The first real state, the Sumerian civilization, hadn’t formed yet in Mesopotamia. Personally, I’m very comfortable making this someone else’s problems 7200 years from now. If they’re still having basic coordination i…