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Do we introduce an unnecessary leap second and then negative leap second every year just to keep the gears oiled? And then if we need one for reals we can incre
by marcus_holmes 2y ago
Do we introduce an unnecessary leap second and then negative leap second every year just to keep the gears oiled? And then if we need one for reals we can increase it to two leap seconds added and only one removed. Though of course that will cause bugs in any code that isn't expecting two leap seconds to be added and assumed that there would only ever be one. sigh
- bee_rider 2y agoWe could build it into daylight savings time. Instead of jumping an hour, we announce what the jump will be every year.
- rawling 2y agoNot everyone's jumps happen at the same time (or ever).
- marcus_holmes 2y agoWe already have non-integer timezone differences. We could allow for leap seconds in that. Europe's timezone could be UTC+2:00:01 while the UK is still UTC+00:00:00
- lmm 2y agoThat has all the same legal difficulties as removing leap seconds from UTC (indeed it sounds like you would remove leap seconds from UTC).
- arp242 2y agoJust accept that time will very slowly drift over the period of many centuries. It's really not a big deal. It's a complete non-problem that doesn't need any solving. Especially since coming up with a robust scheme that will work over the period of many centuries is quite hard (the current leap second system doesn't suffice).
- withinboredom 2y ago> It's really not a big deal. Unless, of course, you are a satellite.
- arp242 2y agoI don't know what you're referring to, but as far as I know satellites can work perfectly fine without a leap second. I'm not aware of any practical advantage of leap seconds anywhere. The only difficulty in abolishing the leap second is that some systems have it incorporated in their protocol, but that's a protocol issue and not an intrinsic time drift issue.
- withinboredom 2y agoTime is attached to the orbit of the earth (very precisely) so when time goes out of sync of the earth, it won't be a good day for anyone.
- arp242 2y agoMost satellite systems don't use leap seconds; you don't need leap seconds to have satellites. And leap seconds don't really "sync time with the earth"; that's not how any of this works. Whether it's now 13:04:00 or 13:04:27 is somewhat arbitrary and all leap seconds do is maintain a certain arbitrary definition.
- Dylan16807 2y agoOrbiting around earth is going to be based on sidereal time, which drifts 4 minutes per day. Converting into normal units has no reason to care about leap seconds when it can use the actual offset and be a few orders of magnitude more precise.