11 ms·
Who is the "we" who wants to keep "in sync" with the Earth's rotation to such high precision? Obviously having 3:30 pm suddenly become the middle of the night w
by dooglius 5y ago
Who is the "we" who wants to keep "in sync" with the Earth's rotation to such high precision? Obviously having 3:30 pm suddenly become the middle of the night would be bad, but we're talking a delta of 18 seconds spread over
almost 50 years... hardly big enough to be called "out of sync" in any noticeable sense. Maybe in a millennium or two we'll lose the cultural context of what "it's 5:00 somewhere" meant, but I'm sure the historians could add a blurb.
- globular-toast 5y agoAgreed, 2 seems way lower priority than the other two. You already put your clock "out of sync" with the Earth's rotation every time you move East or West. Nobody actually cares about this. 1 hour timezones are generally granular enough for our needs.
- smichel17 5y ago+1, seems like leap seconds could be covered via a leap hour every 10k years or so. Implemented as a daylight savings change that gets skipped. Implement it at the level of time zones, which is complexity that we already have to deal with most of the time when we want to interface with humans.
- layer8 5y ago> seems like leap seconds could be covered via a leap hour every 10k years or so. The increase is quadratic. Without leap seconds, the difference will be an hour in 1000 years, but already a full day in 5000 years. https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html -> Effects of disconnecting time from the sun
- smichel17 5y agoAh, that does complicate things. It's not totally clear to me why they think "Given that the first leap hour would not happen for centuries, it is not clear that any systems (legal or technological) would build in the necessary complexity for handling it." It seems like that infrastructure is already in place— the IANA time zone database, and associated technology. UTC would become disconnected from sun-time, but all the other zones could shift relative to it, and it seems like most things would continue to handle it as expected. But, I also trust that other folks have thought about it in more depth than I have. I'm not seriously trying to solve the problem (If I were, I'd get involved in standards committees or similar), and I'm happy to concede that my solution misses key details :)
- layer8 5y agoI tend to agree with what you’re saying. My impression is that the main concern is for current technology used by astronomers, satellites, navigation and so on, which require leap seconds to be taken into account and have a relation to the length of day, and which would stop working correctly if the meaning of broken-down time would suddenly change. It maybe wouldn’t be a major problem if all such systems could be redesigned from scratch.
- a1369209993 5y ago> The increase is quadratic. In that case UTC has the same problem (steadily increasing numbers of leap seconds till we run out of places^Wtimes to put them), so we may as well have a less defective timekeeping system in the mean time.
- throw0101a 5y ago> Obviously having 3:30 pm suddenly become the middle of the night would be bad, but we're talking a delta of 18 seconds spread over almost 50 years... hardly big enough to be called "out of sync" in any noticeable sense. And the Julian calendar was 'good enough' for a long time… until it wasn't and Pope Gregory XIII had to announce the skipping over of 10 days so that (e.g.) the Spring Equinox actually lined up with the season of spring more accurately. I understand the sentiment of wanting to simplify things, but kicking the can down the road so it's someone else's problem is wrong in my eyes.
- iso1631 5y agoLarge parts of the world shift civil time by an hour twice a year. Drifting 1 day every 200,000 years doesn't sound like kicking the can down the road. If human civilisation still exists by the time we've reached just 1 hour of difference we'll be occupying multiple bodies throughout the solar system, if not further afield, and have to have come up with a new time system anyway. Even the length of a second varies because of relativity.
- kijin 5y agoYeah, we already do the Feb 29 thing every 4 years. We make exceptions to that rule every 100 years, and an exception to the exception every 400 years. Those leap years make larger oscillations than any leap second ever tries to correct for, and we're totally fine with that. Adding another exception every 200,000 years doesn't sound unexpected at all.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- user-the-name 5y agoThey do not. Those adjust the calendar, not the clock.
- kijin 5y ago
- teekert 5y agoWhy is it obvious that 3:30 PM bad as the middle of the night is bad? I'm all for a universal world-wide time. then we'd just have to learn what time is middle of the night for what location, but we have digital aids for that. It solves all timezone bs. My guess is is that we whine for about a month and then it becomes normal for ie. 14:00 to be middle of the night depending on you location.
- carl_dr 5y agoOut of interest, have you read https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish?
- teekert 5y agoInteresting but I feel that all questions are answerable with another definition of time relative to "solar noon" (some kind of icon with the sun on an arch comes to mind, my Amafit Smartwatch uses this). Also the article does not take into account that our phones may warn us "that Uncle Steve in Melbourne is probably asleep", for example. The date line? Yeah lets put that in the center of the Pacific.
- toomanyducks 5y agoI personally tried this for a few weeks: I set my clocks to GMT, and converted everyone else's silly little timezones into one unambiguous number. All I accomplished was memorizing the offset between GMT and local time and getting marginally quicker at the required arithematic to convert between them. It didn't even solve any problems, because a) nobody else was doing it, so, shrug, and b) I immediately lost all context for the earth's rotation, and that turned out to be a massive pain in the ass. I think the very least we can do, though, is get rid of DST.
- fullstop 5y agoSwatch tried to do this ages ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
- 5y ago
- quirino 5y agoWe don't even have to go through that situation. As soon as the delta reaches 30 minutes you just shift every timezone by one hour.
- cowboysauce 5y ago>Who is the "we" who wants to keep "in sync" with the Earth's rotation to such high precision? The military is a big one. ICBMs still use celestial navigation to determine their position and adjust their trajectory in flight.
- wpietri 5y agoI don't specifically care about earth's rotation, but as a diurnal creature whose internal body clock synchronizes to the sun, I definitely care about the rhythms of natural light. The whole reason clocks were invented was to help people more precisely measure the day-night cycle. So the question really becomes, "Who is the 'we' who wants to have a more theoretically pure timekeeping system that gets worse and worse at its primary purpose?" Turns out that's a pretty small audience.
- 411111111111111 5y agoIf the drift is 18s over 50 yrs then it doesn't address your issue to any noticable degree throughout your life. Nor that of your children, grandchildren etc etc, as the change is gradual enough that nobody would notice. The only way to get a significant difference is by somehow sleeping for thousands of years (1k would be 6 minutes, which would still be impossible to tell with human senses). It really is a pretty pointless solution to a non-existing problem.
- wpietri 5y agoIf you're saying it is only a little worse in the short term, I agree. But it is still worse at its primary purpose. And in exchange for what exactly? Making it easier on a few programmers to not write a few bugs? If these were the only bugs that ever got written, I might buy it. But we all know that's not the case. Adopting a less correct timekeeping system will reduce the total number of bugs written by 0.000000001%. That is putting the cart firmly before the horse. Computers are here to serve people, not the other way around. Whenever we find ourselves making systems worse due to engineer convenience, we should think real hard about why we get paid the big bucks.
- hansvm 5y ago> adopting a less correct timekeeping system Precisely the opposite, and that's the root of the problem. We started with astronomical clock ticks and have gradually transitioned to progressively more accurate measurements. The attempt to maintain synchronization with astronomical units is for backward compatibility, not because they're more correct.
- sjburt 5y agoAstronomers and navigators. These also were the first people that needed accurate time and first people capable of measuring time accurately, so much of the expertise is in astronomical or naval institutions. This was still very relevant in the 1950s when the modern time systems were being developed. There is a growing movement in the timekeeping community that agrees that keeping UTC close to UT1 is no longer important and that leap seconds should be abandoned.
- myself248 5y agoI tend to agree. Let astronomers use a rotation-synchronized time. (Aren't they bothered by jumps anyway? They probably need a more gradual skew, which is to say, not SI seconds.) Let everyone else use TAI, and in a few millennia when high noon isn't noon anymore, we'll worry about it then. Oh by the way, unless you live smack in the middle of a timezone, solar noon isn't clock noon anyway. Plus it gets all jacked up with daylight savings (which should also be abandoned), so the whole notion of leap seconds is farcical on its face.
- MaxikCZ 5y agoThis is the kind of half assed solution that could be called procrastination. Its obvious the only solution is to slow Earth rotation down so we have no need for leap seconds while maintaining high noon precision for millenia
- dylan604 5y agoOr just change the orbit of the earth and moon. You'd solve the leap seconds problem && climate change!!!
- bigiain 5y agoThe article addresses that nicely in it's 4th sentence: " ... one day I would like to do the math on the “great leap second gyroscopes” that we could mount near the poles to steady the Earth’s rotation, so we can stop talking about this. We may occasionally have to desaturate these gyroscopes with huge rockets also." I have an alternative solution, which is that we stop earths rotation and get it tidally locked to the sun, so it's always 00:00:00.000 midnight at Greenwich UK. This'll screw up the ski resorts in New Zealand, but anyone who's spent a winter in Invercargill on the South Island there will agree that it'd be much much nicer as a tropical paradise.