Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a minor problem. One minute off in a hundred years is something we can all live with.
Can GPS handle this? Or is it under a different time standard?
The article mentioned GPS uses UT1
The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
81–90 of 456 posts
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#82Note that what the article actually says is that there will be no more leap seconds starting in 2035. There could easily still be more before then.
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#83> How, and whether, to keep atomic time in sync with Earth's rotation is still up for debate. […] > 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. But it plans to consult with other international organizations and decide by 2026 on what upper limit, if any, to…
And we finished that transition in 1917. Time is hard.
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#84Currently 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.
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#85> How, and whether, to keep atomic time in sync with Earth's rotation is still up for debate. […] > 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. But it plans to consult with other international organizations and decide by 2026 on what upper limit, if any, to…
The drift is sufficiently slow that you can fix it with a "leap hour" when needed -- perhaps once every five thousand years. This could be handled for civil/local time via an adjustment in the timezone definitions (something which happens a few times a year today), leaving the underlying UTC timebase unchanged.
> This could be handled for civil/local time via an adjustment in the timezone definitions (something which happens a few times a year today), leaving the underlying UTC timebase unchanged.
Like I said: it could become a huge coordination problem.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Adoption_by...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_the_Gregorian_cale...
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#86Hot take… Storing anything as UTC was a mistake and we should be using TAI for all storage and computation, only transforming into more human friendly formats for display to end users. This never needed to be a problem except we decided to make it harder to use TAI than UTC and so everything got built up off the backs of legacy bios level hardware supported UTC style clock behaviour, when we should have been using TA…
What would using TAI solve exactly? I'm unfamiliar.
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#87It seems I've got an unpopular opinion reading the comments here, but having some leap seconds from time to time ensure we are able to manage them. But "no leap second should be added for at least a century" ensures there will be a y2k reckoning every century. Seems short sighted to me, even if it is not a game-changing issue, let's be honest.
Leap seconds are not useful. We do not need to use them anymore. While yes you are right in that more leap seconds makes it easier to handle leap seconds, it is just better to not have to worry about leap seconds altogother. It is unneeded complexity that helps no one.
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#88> Leap seconds aren’t predictable, because they depend on to Earth’s natural rotation. This is surprising to me. Is the Earth's rotation so arbitrary?
More like the precision of ± 0.5 seconds / year, that is to say 15 parts per billion, is that ludicrous. For comparison, time acceleration in geostationary orbit due to general relativity is somewhat less than one part per billion. Household tools (other than clocks) rarely go beyond a percent, and if you need a particular quantity you don’t have a ready-made tool for you’ll likely going to be hard-pressed to go beyond ten percent.
The more precise you want to be, the more complex and numerous physical phenomena you need to consider become; with a system as involved as the Earth, at some point you get to weather-like chaotic behaviour, so no practical amount of additional precision in input data helps anymore.
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#89It seems I've got an unpopular opinion reading the comments here, but having some leap seconds from time to time ensure we are able to manage them. But "no leap second should be added for at least a century" ensures there will be a y2k reckoning every century. Seems short sighted to me, even if it is not a game-changing issue, let's be honest.
Why have them at all? how many people do things where they actually matter? at the current rate it'll be ~9000ad before we hit an hour offset, and we do hour offsets twice a year, so if an hour off is okay why is 1 second off not?
Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks
#90Hot take: Leap seconds caused by astronomers refusing to modify their own software, instead getting the rest of the world to modify theirs. Too facile?
Very much so. Look at astronomical software, e.g. xephem. There will be a "clocks" tab that displays a number of different clocks, TAI (atomic clock, no leap seconds), UTC (global civil time), media solar time (GMT, which ISN'T UTC) and finally, derived from the aforementioned "sidereal time", which is the one you really need to adjust your telescope. Sidereal time is derived from a year with 1 more day basically, be…
(insert link to canonical "standards" xkcd)