6 ms·

Leap seconds are the most stupidest thing ever. It's time to abandon UTC and start using what professional astronomers use: UT1

by dvh 8y ago

max76 8y ago
Just like the amount of mass in a gram doesn't change based on location, time, or any other variable it's very important to have some measurement of time that is as constant and precise as possible. This helps us conduct science, where many types of experiments take place in less than a second. The measurements taken today should be readable decades or centuries from now without having to adjust for the slowing of Earth's rotation. Now, maybe this unit of time needed for scientific purposes doesn't need to be the same one used for daily life.
- groestl 8y ago
  > maybe this unit of time needed for scientific purposes doesn't need to be the same one used for daily life. Don't think the unit is the problem, it's the offset. And when it comes to that, we already have a virtualization layer which assures alignment with the sun for social purposes: time zones. No need to add another one over TAI.
  - ianai 8y ago
    Except that’s not entirely the story of time zones. They’re political divisions. Some of them match up with the sun better than others. For instance, the sunset time gets pretty weird in LV over the winter.
    - groestl 8y ago
      > They’re political divisions Which I think is perfectly fine (if not necessary) for that layer. The human body doesn't care for extra seconds, and science doesn't either. So who do we do the "coordination" in UTC for? If - over hundreds of years - the time zone drifts off into weirdness, it can be changed politically. What more do you need?
      - majewsky 8y ago
        Time zones need to be defined relative to some reference time, and UTC is (sort of) the least impractical reference.
        groestl 8y ago
        UTC adds little of value on top of TAI, except some headache for clock synchronization. So I argue for basing timezones directly on TAI, as I see TAI as the least impractical reference.
      - max76 8y ago
        Oh. In UT1 there number of seconds in a day is constant, so it's value is defined by the rotation of the earth which is slowing. UTC is better than UT1 in that regard. Maybe UT1 is fine for humans, but really humans just assume ut1.
burfog 8y ago
UT1 is a disaster for many purposes. It is, quite simply, a measure of the Earth's current angle in space. This is ideal for pointing an Earth-based telescope. Trouble is, we can't reliably predict how fast this will tick. You may think leap seconds are bad, but how about if you simply can't know the current time without having a current measurement of the position of quasars in the sky? The length of a second isn't even constant. TAI matches up with the atomic second, and UTC is that plus enough leap seconds to approximate UT1. It all sucks, but this is reality. You can't fix reality. You'd have to tell the Earth to obey an atomic clock.
- freeflight 8y ago
  > It all sucks, but this is reality. You can't fix reality. You'd have to tell the Earth to obey an atomic clock. The question might be super naive, but I wonder how useful/workable a time-system would be that's completely decoupled from celestial body movements? Isn't Swatch Internet Time something like that? Gonna be really interesting once humanity becomes interplanetary or even interstellar. Will we have whole different calendars and time zones for different planets and solar systems?
  - antepodius 8y ago
    You'd imagine an internet time (or civilisation time) used for timekeeping in interplanetary protocols, synced (relatively) well to Earth- or wherever the centre of human Civilisation ends up being. Because clock speed changes due to relativity, your Civilisation Time counter would have to take into account your position and velocity relative to earth to not slip- while syncing often enough to counteract This way you can have relatively stable time measurement, even when time strictly speaking passes faster for some computers than others. Time slows down as you go faster. The people leaving earth are the ones accelerating, so they're the ones who travel faster into the future- less time passes for them. If we colonise stars around us, the people going to the further stars (assume all ships leave from earth) will lose more time: Civilisation Time will be ahead of the time they measure on their regular clocks. Maybe we could use pulsars as clocks? I think they pulse pretty regularly.
  - deleted 8y ago
paulie_a 8y ago
I beg to differ, Dst is the stupidest time related thing ever. From a software development perspective it is a tremendous pain in the ass and is stupid. From the non software aspect it is just stupid and annoying.
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  I submit the Japanese imperial succession and the necessary changes to traditional calendars as another contender...
- tertius 8y ago
  From a non-software perspective it kills people. Also, if you're a parent, it's not great for sleep training children. It just messes with everyone.
  - reidjs 8y ago
    Can you elaborate on how it kills people??
    - evan_ 8y ago
      Traffic deaths spike following the DST starting (and to a lesser extent, ending) date- thought to be due to disrupted sleep schedules. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11152980/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11152980/
    - tux1968 8y ago
      There is apparently an increase in heart-attacks right after the transition, attributed by some to the loss of an hours sleep... https://www.livescience.com/50068-daylight-saving-time-heart-attacks.html https://www.livescience.com/50068-daylight-saving-time-heart...
- dooglius 8y ago
  Leap seconds are a lot worse for software development, because Unix time does not include DST adjustments, but does include leap second adjustments. This means that if you use unix time in an application, you can just use a library at the input/output edge and not worry about it, but leap seconds can screw up anywhere that you use a timestamp.
widforss 8y ago
I think you've wrapped your head the wrong way around this. The stupidest thing ever is the idea that a country's government can be shut down as an extortion method. It's a concept so alien to me that I cannot fathom the logic of the person who came up with the idea.
- tertius 8y ago
  What has been the best argument for it that you've found?
- CamTin 8y ago
  Nobody "came up with" the idea. It's the consequence of a principle of the American Constitution, wherein only Congress can appropriate money. This is a bedrock principle, because it provides a check on the Executive: The President can yell all he wants, but unless Congress appropriates money to pay for whatever it is he is yelling about (in this case, a border wall), he doesn't get it. For observers outside the US, the idea of "the national government shutting down" probably seems way way more alarming that it does to most Americans. Almost all basic services in the US are handled by states and municipalities. This includes garbage collection, policing, firefighters, schools, local tax collection, road maintenance, the majority of prisons, most courts, most water and power infrastructure, building inspections and permitting, and many more. Even airports, the site of a lot of hand-wringing during the shutdown due to the TSA (security screeners) and air-traffic controllers being federal employees, are usually (always?) municipally or state-owned. I have no idea of the legality of these municipalities or the airlines themselves stepping in to pay the ATCs or screeners, but it doesn't seem totally bonkers.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    The problem is threefold: 1) it's not a true shutdown because the military still get paid. There is a builtin rightwing fudge of what gets deemed "essential". 2) Most governments have a similar possibility of not being able to pass a budget; but, in the Westminster system, this forces fresh elections. The people get to decide on what compromise is necessary to resume business. 3) Businesses should not make their employees into creditors. Failing to make payroll is usually a sign that a business is either unethical or nearly bankrupt. This screws over people badly, e.g. https://twitter.com/shawndgoldman/status/1085733207469891585 https://twitter.com/shawndgoldman/status/1085733207469891585 "The NASA Postdoctoral Program contract runs out of money tomorrow. This means its fellows - some of the best and brightest space scientists in the world - will go without pay starting Friday. These folks are contractors, which means they aren't covered by the backpay bill." (There was also some suggestion that not being paid would automatically terminate their J-1 visas, but I can't find that now)
SiempreViernes 8y ago
Leap seconds is just the time abstraction being leaky: the Earth simply doesn’t have a constant rotation speed. Certainly seems more practical to correct for this once in a while rather than having a variable length second.
- gizmo686 8y ago
  We could easily define a time system that is simply "number of seconds since 00:00:00 January 1, 1970" (other than epoch being different, we have this with GPS and TAI time, but the network effects for UTC are strong) and used that as our base time system. Leap seconds could then be added at higher layers simmilar to how leap hours are. Instead evryone has to deal with leap seconds weather they care about the orientation of Earth or not. Also, at least for computer applications, a variable lenfth second is easier to deal with than a leap second.
  - SiempreViernes 8y ago
    Yes, you can easily create a constant rate counter, but no: it wouln't keep time. To keep time you do care about the position of the sun because that defines the time of day, humanity's base for the experience of time. If you will never care about what the time is in your application, by all means, count clock cycles, otherwise: UTC is the standard for keeping time.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - hakfoo 8y ago
      That brings up an interesting question: Is that the current, best, or only basis for time? I'd argue that many relevant time concepts are more framed by social conventions than the sun. Most of us are more interested in concepts like "when does work start", "lunch time", and "when the store closes", than "when does sunrise occur" these days. In a pre-industrial society, those might be closely synched, but less so today.
batbomb 8y ago
You mean TAI, not UT1.

Leap seconds are the most stupidest thing ever. It's time to abandon UTC and start using what professional astronomers use: UT1

by dvh 8y ago

Leap seconds are the most stupidest thing ever. It's time to abandon UTC and start using what professional astronomers use: UT1

max76 8y ago

Just like the amount of mass in a gram doesn't change based on location, time, or any other variable it's very important to have some measurement of time that is as constant and precise as possible. This helps us conduct science, where many types of experiments take place in less than a second. The measurements taken today should be readable decades or centuries from now without having to adjust for the slowing of Earth's rotation. Now, maybe this unit of time needed for scientific purposes doesn't need to be the same one used for daily life.

groestl 8y ago
> maybe this unit of time needed for scientific purposes doesn't need to be the same one used for daily life. Don't think the unit is the problem, it's the offset. And when it comes to that, we already have a virtualization layer which assures alignment with the sun for social purposes: time zones. No need to add another one over TAI.
- ianai 8y ago
  Except that’s not entirely the story of time zones. They’re political divisions. Some of them match up with the sun better than others. For instance, the sunset time gets pretty weird in LV over the winter.
  - groestl 8y ago
    > They’re political divisions Which I think is perfectly fine (if not necessary) for that layer. The human body doesn't care for extra seconds, and science doesn't either. So who do we do the "coordination" in UTC for? If - over hundreds of years - the time zone drifts off into weirdness, it can be changed politically. What more do you need?
    - majewsky 8y ago
      Time zones need to be defined relative to some reference time, and UTC is (sort of) the least impractical reference.
      - groestl 8y ago
        UTC adds little of value on top of TAI, except some headache for clock synchronization. So I argue for basing timezones directly on TAI, as I see TAI as the least impractical reference.
    - max76 8y ago
      Oh. In UT1 there number of seconds in a day is constant, so it's value is defined by the rotation of the earth which is slowing. UTC is better than UT1 in that regard. Maybe UT1 is fine for humans, but really humans just assume ut1.

burfog 8y ago

UT1 is a disaster for many purposes. It is, quite simply, a measure of the Earth's current angle in space. This is ideal for pointing an Earth-based telescope. Trouble is, we can't reliably predict how fast this will tick. You may think leap seconds are bad, but how about if you simply can't know the current time without having a current measurement of the position of quasars in the sky? The length of a second isn't even constant. TAI matches up with the atomic second, and UTC is that plus enough leap seconds to approximate UT1. It all sucks, but this is reality. You can't fix reality. You'd have to tell the Earth to obey an atomic clock.

freeflight 8y ago
> It all sucks, but this is reality. You can't fix reality. You'd have to tell the Earth to obey an atomic clock. The question might be super naive, but I wonder how useful/workable a time-system would be that's completely decoupled from celestial body movements? Isn't Swatch Internet Time something like that? Gonna be really interesting once humanity becomes interplanetary or even interstellar. Will we have whole different calendars and time zones for different planets and solar systems?
- antepodius 8y ago
  You'd imagine an internet time (or civilisation time) used for timekeeping in interplanetary protocols, synced (relatively) well to Earth- or wherever the centre of human Civilisation ends up being. Because clock speed changes due to relativity, your Civilisation Time counter would have to take into account your position and velocity relative to earth to not slip- while syncing often enough to counteract This way you can have relatively stable time measurement, even when time strictly speaking passes faster for some computers than others. Time slows down as you go faster. The people leaving earth are the ones accelerating, so they're the ones who travel faster into the future- less time passes for them. If we colonise stars around us, the people going to the further stars (assume all ships leave from earth) will lose more time: Civilisation Time will be ahead of the time they measure on their regular clocks. Maybe we could use pulsars as clocks? I think they pulse pretty regularly.
- deleted 8y ago

paulie_a 8y ago

I beg to differ, Dst is the stupidest time related thing ever. From a software development perspective it is a tremendous pain in the ass and is stupid. From the non software aspect it is just stupid and annoying.

bayesian_horse 8y ago
I submit the Japanese imperial succession and the necessary changes to traditional calendars as another contender...
tertius 8y ago
From a non-software perspective it kills people. Also, if you're a parent, it's not great for sleep training children. It just messes with everyone.
- reidjs 8y ago
  Can you elaborate on how it kills people??
  - evan_ 8y ago
    Traffic deaths spike following the DST starting (and to a lesser extent, ending) date- thought to be due to disrupted sleep schedules. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11152980/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11152980/
  - tux1968 8y ago
    There is apparently an increase in heart-attacks right after the transition, attributed by some to the loss of an hours sleep... https://www.livescience.com/50068-daylight-saving-time-heart-attacks.html https://www.livescience.com/50068-daylight-saving-time-heart...
dooglius 8y ago
Leap seconds are a lot worse for software development, because Unix time does not include DST adjustments, but does include leap second adjustments. This means that if you use unix time in an application, you can just use a library at the input/output edge and not worry about it, but leap seconds can screw up anywhere that you use a timestamp.

widforss 8y ago

I think you've wrapped your head the wrong way around this. The stupidest thing ever is the idea that a country's government can be shut down as an extortion method. It's a concept so alien to me that I cannot fathom the logic of the person who came up with the idea.

tertius 8y ago
What has been the best argument for it that you've found?
CamTin 8y ago
Nobody "came up with" the idea. It's the consequence of a principle of the American Constitution, wherein only Congress can appropriate money. This is a bedrock principle, because it provides a check on the Executive: The President can yell all he wants, but unless Congress appropriates money to pay for whatever it is he is yelling about (in this case, a border wall), he doesn't get it. For observers outside the US, the idea of "the national government shutting down" probably seems way way more alarming that it does to most Americans. Almost all basic services in the US are handled by states and municipalities. This includes garbage collection, policing, firefighters, schools, local tax collection, road maintenance, the majority of prisons, most courts, most water and power infrastructure, building inspections and permitting, and many more. Even airports, the site of a lot of hand-wringing during the shutdown due to the TSA (security screeners) and air-traffic controllers being federal employees, are usually (always?) municipally or state-owned. I have no idea of the legality of these municipalities or the airlines themselves stepping in to pay the ATCs or screeners, but it doesn't seem totally bonkers.
- pjc50 8y ago
  The problem is threefold: 1) it's not a true shutdown because the military still get paid. There is a builtin rightwing fudge of what gets deemed "essential". 2) Most governments have a similar possibility of not being able to pass a budget; but, in the Westminster system, this forces fresh elections. The people get to decide on what compromise is necessary to resume business. 3) Businesses should not make their employees into creditors. Failing to make payroll is usually a sign that a business is either unethical or nearly bankrupt. This screws over people badly, e.g. https://twitter.com/shawndgoldman/status/1085733207469891585 https://twitter.com/shawndgoldman/status/1085733207469891585 "The NASA Postdoctoral Program contract runs out of money tomorrow. This means its fellows - some of the best and brightest space scientists in the world - will go without pay starting Friday. These folks are contractors, which means they aren't covered by the backpay bill." (There was also some suggestion that not being paid would automatically terminate their J-1 visas, but I can't find that now)

SiempreViernes 8y ago

Leap seconds is just the time abstraction being leaky: the Earth simply doesn’t have a constant rotation speed. Certainly seems more practical to correct for this once in a while rather than having a variable length second.

gizmo686 8y ago
We could easily define a time system that is simply "number of seconds since 00:00:00 January 1, 1970" (other than epoch being different, we have this with GPS and TAI time, but the network effects for UTC are strong) and used that as our base time system. Leap seconds could then be added at higher layers simmilar to how leap hours are. Instead evryone has to deal with leap seconds weather they care about the orientation of Earth or not. Also, at least for computer applications, a variable lenfth second is easier to deal with than a leap second.
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  Yes, you can easily create a constant rate counter, but no: it wouln't keep time. To keep time you do care about the position of the sun because that defines the time of day, humanity's base for the experience of time. If you will never care about what the time is in your application, by all means, count clock cycles, otherwise: UTC is the standard for keeping time.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - hakfoo 8y ago
    That brings up an interesting question: Is that the current, best, or only basis for time? I'd argue that many relevant time concepts are more framed by social conventions than the sun. Most of us are more interested in concepts like "when does work start", "lunch time", and "when the store closes", than "when does sunrise occur" these days. In a pre-industrial society, those might be closely synched, but less so today.

batbomb 8y ago

You mean TAI, not UT1.