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No. Astronomers deal with the problem leap seconds pretend to do with their own, more precise methods. If the actual leap seconds do not benefit astronomers, a
by ncmncm 4y ago
No. Astronomers deal with the problem leap seconds pretend to do with their own, more precise methods.
If the actual leap seconds do not benefit astronomers, and do not benefit anyone else, they are purely a tax on us all.
Abandon leap seconds in UTC, and literally everybody is better off. Even astronomers, who would go from managing 3 time systems to just two.
- agrajag 4y agoAstronomers whose software uses UTC and isn’t able to change to UT1, and who don’t need precision less than 1 second, but more than 3-5 seconds or so will be worse off. This seems like much less net inconvenience than what the tech industry has to deal with when it comes to leap seconds. I hear the argument that we have to deal with this eventually to keep time in track with mean solar time, but the adjustments are so small that I don’t see any real impact on regular people.
- structural 4y agoYou could very likely fund fixing the software of every astronomer on the planet for less than the cost of one outage caused by adding/removing a leap second when you look at Meta + Google + a few telcos.
- mr_toad 4y ago> If the actual leap seconds do not benefit astronomers, and do not benefit anyone else, they are purely a tax on us all. May as well dispense with the calendar entirely and just measure time in powers of ten. An day is about 80 kiloseconds, and a year about 30 megaseconds. Maybe many gigaseconds into the future our descendants will learn about old Earth time keeping in school, along with Roman numerals and the imperial system.
- ncmncm 4y agoYes, you will certainly persuade 100% of the world to rewrite all their code to your thing, and buy all new equipment with your thing in ROM.