5 ms·
The obvious correction is to change the duration of a second such that a year is exactly $integer seconds long. While this will make the duration of second drif
by indigo945 7y ago
The obvious correction is to change the duration of a second such that a year is exactly $integer seconds long. While this will make the duration of second drift from year to year, that drift is so small that everyday devices like consumer-grade computers could just ignore it, provided they're NTP synced once every five years or so. Physicists can just keep using whatever they're using and call it by a different name. Ideal solution all-around.
- taneq 7y agoThe core issue is that the number of days per year is messy, so it's not possible to have a 'nice' number of seconds in a day and also in a year. The best solution is probably just to use a nice number of seconds per day and accept the fact that in 100ish years summer will start in March, not December. It's not like we need to build our entire society around planting and harvest any more.
- macspoofing 7y agoThat's not anywhere close to "the best solution"
- taneq 7y agoThis discussion isn't going to be very meaningful unless you wanna tell us what 'best' means to you.
- macspoofing 7y agoThat's fair. I simply can't see the best solution relying on getting rid of deeply ingrained culutural norms that span thousands of years.
- taneq 7y agoYeah, I can see that being an issue, at least until a decent proportion of humanity lives off-world. I can't see people living in the asteroid belts adding arbitrary leap-seconds. Of course, once you start dealing with astronomical distances and speeds, the whole concept of a single universal measure of time kind of goes out the window anyway so it's probably going to get worse, not better. :P (FWIW my definition of 'best' here is something along the lines of 'simple, no special rules or tinkering, gets translated to a human-readable local time on demand'. Which is pretty much how Unix epoch works, come to think of it.)
- ycombobreaker 7y agoYes... let's let future asteroid dwellers solve their own problems, which will be as much cultural as technical. Today's elegant universal solution is sometimes tomorrow's Esperanto: perfectly useless.
- pure-awesome 7y agoMarch is already summer here (Southern Hemisphere). We have all sorts of weird eccentricities due to "cultural norms" (we use snowflakes on our Christmas cards in mid-summer, whereas the Steam Summer Sale happens mid-winter). Not to mention with climate change, we're probably going to have to deal with many other changes in season etc. anyway. All of us deal with the fact that the day gets shorter and longer every year anyway (and daylight savings didn't seem to be a terribly good solution). I think having the seasons slowly drift is a non-issue, provided it's just slow enough to not be noticeable from year to year.
- not_kurt_godel 7y agoAre we to infer that your lack of criteria for "best" in your own post means that it too is meaningless? You made a breath-taking leap going from {our society isn't as dependent on planting and harvesting anymore} to {therefore it's "probably best" to radically alter universal concepts of temporality to partially solve an obscure technical problem}. Methinks the burden on proof lies firmly in your court on this one.
- taneq 7y agoI'm not the one arguing with a statement in that post.
- nicky0 7y agoBut we do build our entire society around sports seasons.