9 ms·
Well, the problem with this is that every simplistic view at time is... well... too simple. It's not that many people haven't tried, I especially like this arti
by endymi0n 7y ago
Well, the problem with this is that every simplistic view at time is... well... too simple. It's not that many people haven't tried, I especially like this article: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
That being said, why your approach doesn't work is that there are several hard astronomical or cultural definitions that you'd throw off by playing with time.
A day is defined as the rotation of the earth around its axis.
A week is a hard cultural and religious boundary for just about everything in life.
A month is roughly the rotation of the moon around the earth (although that definition is arguably the weakest and ready to go)
A year is defined as the rotation of the earth around the sun.
Changing any of these will make the summer drift into the winter, or the night into the day, or whatever.
Time just isn't simple, and although most of these intervals _almost_ fit within each other, reality is that they don't and we'll always have artifacts.
If you enjoy philosophy on these kinds of imperfections as much as I do, I can heavily recommend this article about musical tuning: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/the-saddest-thing-i-know-about-the-integers/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/the-sadd...
- m1el 7y ago> Well, the problem with this is that every simplistic view at time is... well... too simple. It's not that many people haven't tried, I especially like this article: https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish This has nothing to do with leap seconds. Leap seconds are the worst mechanism in keeping time, there's not a single advantage to having leap seconds. > A day is defined as the rotation of the earth around its axis. And we can now measure time with precision high enough that tying to Earth's rotation is not acceptable. We can still use timezones to fix the shift. > Changing any of these will make the summer drift into the winter, or the night into the day, or whatever. Yeah, and it will take a millennium for Earth rotation to shift enough for people to notice it. On the other hand, you'd have no problem with summer/winter time I presume?
- endymi0n 7y ago> Yeah, and it will take a millennium for Earth rotation to shift enough for people to notice it. On the other hand, you'd have no problem with summer/winter time I presume? No, I don't, as they are just views on a monotonically increasing time scale named UTC that keeps up with Earth's rotation, so that every single thing from climate diagrams to everything else humanity is syncing on keeps working and being comparable. > We can still use timezones to fix the shift. Or, we could not do that. Everyone is free to use TAI inside their own projects as they see fit if they have the needs for strictly monotonically increasing time. I would argue that leap second smearing has way less artifacts in practice than bolting time zones onto a shifting UTC time.
- planteen 7y agoYour article is about time zones, not leap seconds? The US has put forth a proposal to abolish leap seconds. It is now supported by China, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. The ITU keeps punting on actually voting on it - it's now scheduled for 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second A day already drifts... every single day in fact. Why is 0.9 sec the magic threshold for maximum drift? Why can't it be 1 minute of drift, or 1 hour of drift? We are putting out problematic corrections for something a minor drift on the scale of years that should be happening on the scale of centuries or millennia in my opinion.
- endymi0n 7y agoThat's interesting, I stand corrected. TIL that it's actually a heavily disputed topic and much less clear than I painted it, I had quite a different impression before — thanks!
- reitanqild 7y agoHappy to see it is not just me that enjoy getting rid of my ignorance : )
- lutorm 7y agoIt's a lot easier to test and prepare for something that occurs at least semi-regularly than a monumental event far into the future that is "so far into the future we don't have to worry about it"....
- wmf 7y agoIf we abolish leap seconds (and any other changes to UTC) and let the error accumulate until it hits 30 minutes then a 1-hour time zone change can adjust for it. Time zone changes happen at least semi-regularly so it wouldn't be monumental.
- quickthrower2 7y agoWouldn’t that move the international date line?
- msla 7y ago> A day is defined as the rotation of the earth around its axis. When you get into the world of programming for most people, businesses especially, a day is defined as 24 hours. We like to think that our days and months and years are tied to vast astronomical forces, for romantic reasons, but when it comes down to it, everything comes back to the second, and the second is defined to be a single unvarying length of time.
- FabHK 7y agoWell, depends. In TAI: A day is 24 hours (86400 seconds always), and a second is a SI second. In UTC: A day is a rotation of the earth, and a second is a SI second. (And since these are incompatible, we have to introduce leap seconds). In UT1: A day is a rotation of the earth, and a second is 1/86400 of a rotation of the earth. Julia, interestingly, uses the UT1 notion, thus avoiding leap seconds, IIRC.
- msla 7y agoMy point is this: Most people don't know about UTC/TAI/UT1 or any other standard. They know what's common knowledge, and what's common knowledge is that one day is 24 hours precisely, one hour is sixty minutes precisely, and one minute is sixty seconds precisely. Therefore, when writing software to interface with most people, including businesses with contracts defined in terms of those time definitions, one day is 24 hours or else you end up with problems.
- FabHK 7y agoThat's why I advocate using UT1 in programming (like Julia), where all of the above is true. The cost we pay for that is that a UT1 second is not exactly a SI second, but I don't see how that matters except in GPS etc.
- IggleSniggle 7y agoWell, just to nitpick, seconds do vary in comparative length from reference frame to reference frame...and that actually does start to matter in global computing.
- bradknowles 7y agoThe third principle of Continuous Delivery is "If something is difficult or painful, do it more often". So, if leapseconds are actually painful for you, then maybe we need to contemplate making this kind of adjustment on a finer timescale, like milliseconds. OTOH, if you think leapseconds are painful now, just you wait until you postpone this pain and do it even less frequently.
- faho 7y ago>The third principle of Continuous Delivery is "If something is difficult or painful, do it more often". That only works assuming you need to do it at all. If leap seconds are useless (to the majority of users) or insufficient, not doing them is preferable to doing them constantly.
- planteen 7y ago> So, if leapseconds are actually painful for you, then maybe we need to contemplate making this kind of adjustment on a finer timescale, like milliseconds. That is what a lot of organizations do, "smearing" the leap second since they know their systems can't handle the discontinuity. I think this shows that software has failed in general at handling leap seconds correctly. As another said, I think leap seconds are unnecessary complexity with the frequency at which they happen.
- ycombobreaker 7y agoOn the contrary, I think that the smearing behavior is an indication that leap seconds poison an otherwise-useful model of reality. The discontinuity is an annoying edge case driven by the fact that "time error" accumulates, so it seems to me that that a 1-day smear is a more natural approximation than an instantaneous discontinuity. That, and tuned for the attention span of human organizations.
- twic 7y agoThat principle is more of a koan than actual concrete advice. For example, deleting your entire codebase and firing all your developers is painful, but even the most continuous deliverer wouldn't advise you to do that more often.
- shados 7y agoI know it will never happen because of cultural reasons, but really, we need to separate the time (as in how I describe a point on the time scale, for, let say, a meeting, especially one that involves people in globally distributed locations), and the cultural aspect (at what time people are sleeping or eating lunch). Right now those two things are intertwined, and that's bad. Not everyone eats lunch around noon or go to bed at 23:00 anyway, so the cultural part is very fuzzy. I should be able to describe time in an almost metric way. A unit that is the same no matter where I am in the world and doesn't change based on how fast a rock moves around a fireball. "Hey person in Japan, let's have a video meeting at 1,234,99" where that number means the same thing to the as it does to me. Its going to be dark for one of us and bright for another. Then we can have a different unit, let's call it "day offset". That is the offset from the first number that dictates when a particular area considers to be "the day", when the average people wakes up, have lunch, have dinner, go to bed. "Let's meet at 1,234,99. I know you're in Japan and your offset is +9,23 while here it's "-5,78" so it's a bit inconvenient, but hopefully you can make it!" Yes, I realize I'm roughly describing how time and timezone works, with an important difference: with the current system, people live around the adjusted number. The number after the timezone is applied. After the leap seconds and all that crap is applied. Some people argue about daylight saving or no. Computers have to deal with all of it. Let's make the non-adjusted number what people use day to day, and the "offset" is a static number picked by the locals, that include stuff like daylight saving, leap seconds, and various other cultural adjustment. Its only purpose is to communicate the cultural or location difference between 2 people. Obviously that will never happen, but Ill keep dreaming.
- philwelch 7y agoThere have been a net +27 leap seconds since the 1970’s. That’s not enough to turn summer into winter or day into night. That’s roughly a full minute per century.
- btilly 7y agoYour statement is both true and misleading. The speed of the Earth's rotation is slowing over time. Therefore leap seconds are becoming more and more common. In a century, we should be averaging something like 1 a year. In 500 years, we should be averaging one every few months. And so on. It took over a thousand years for the Julian calendar to fall apart. Our current timekeeping system will also fall apart eventually, and I would be surprised if it lasted as long.
- GordonS 7y agoEven if there was a leap second every year... does it matter? It would still take several hundred years for the difference to be noticeable, at which point you can just change UTC by +-1h.
- btilly 7y agoWhat it means is that the discrepancy between clocks and time of day is growing quadratically. It won't matter to us in our lifetimes. But eventually it will be a problem. It will take on the order of a thousand years for the discrepancy to add up to an hour. In 5000 years, it will be around a day. The fact that it is currently growing about a minute per century is true, but not a good predictor of what will happen. That said, I prefer if we just lose the astronomical basis for time keeping, and let our distant descendants figure out that they should use time zones, and not modify UTC. Hopefully by the time it becomes obvious that clocks are drifting too fast for time zones to change all of the time, we're a multi-planetary species and paying attention to what is happening on the Earth seems quaint.
- philwelch 7y ago
- ClassyJacket 7y ago"Changing any of these will make the summer drift into the winter, or the night into the day, or whatever." Leap days, sure. Leap seconds - as the article points out, there have only been 27 so far since 1970. Less than a minute per century isn't much drift, and could be corrected in a bigger block later.
- tomrod 7y agoThe earth doesn't travel the same course each year. It's chaotic. Best to define a second as a certain distance light travels in a vacuum and use that to build minutes, hours, etc. Then, have a fixed geo reference point (like, say, geo 0:0) that holds an atomic clock as a main reference. We are only really talking about local coordinate changes in the time dimension, really, so might as well simplify.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chithanh 7y ago> The earth doesn't travel the same course each year. It's chaotic. I would prefer to call it quasiperiodic.
- tomrod 7y agoSee Laskar's work, mentioned here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_of_the_Solar_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_of_the_Solar_Syste...
- CameronNemo 7y ago>A day is defined as the rotation of the earth around its axis. >A year is defined as the rotation of the earth around the sun. Sounds like we need a generic geo-solar measurement.
- jondubois 7y agoWe should abolish local time too. There should be a single time for every country which is the number of milliseconds since either the beginning of human civilization, the beginning of earth or the universe.
- iainmerrick 7y agoA. Why? B. If you want to be super strict about it, as I imagine you do, that scheme would hit problems with relativistic effects. Local time is the only real time.
- adrianN 7y agoI like Swatch Internet Time.
- teddyh 7y agoSo You Want To Abolish Time Zones https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish
- lozf 7y agoMean Julian Days (MJD) are the agreed standard for something like that. Abolishing local time has a number of issues as linked in other comments. The time standards we currently have are all well suited to their purpose, it's just a case of picking the most appropriate one for the task. (Plenty of room for more TAI in modern technology).