3 ms·

If I'm reading the linked projections correctly, even the worst predicitions put us at less then three minutes off from the earths rotation by the year 2100, an

If I'm reading the linked projections correctly, even the worst predicitions put us at less then three minutes off from the earths rotation by the year 2100, and it will take somewhere in the area a thousand years to be off by an hour. I'll be frank: if we haven't progressed to the point that those offsets generally don't matter by those points in time, we've probably already failed as a species. I say we drop leap seconds.

ajross 11y ago
Offsets "generally don't matter" now, which is why this is an obscure bit of minutiae you're reading about on HN instead of NYT. But they matter to some applications, and those people have arguments trying to decide which to use. But yes: the ultimate solution if the world were to move to atomic/absolute clock synchronization instead of referencing the Earth's rotation is that every few hundred years we would need to adjust all the time zones by an hour to keep "noon" in the middle of the day. Given that we do this every decade or two anyway chasing DST vogues, I think this would be acceptable.
Trombone12 11y ago
It is the heavens that set the time for humanity, all else must either imitate or pick another name. Abandoning the leap seconds means breaking the connection between utc and what the people consider time to mean. It is not so much that the actual times drift apart very fast, it is that the clock tries to corrupt the meaning of the word "day". If leap seconds cause problems for your application, you probably should find another source of synchronisation signal.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  Yeah, another source like... seconds. Plenty of applications need to know a precise number of seconds (or milliseconds or nanoseconds) between the present and a past or future date/time. Leap seconds throw a wrench in that. Whether UTC should serve the role of an unaltered time source is indeed a matter of debate (and for good reason), but it's pretty clear that we do need an unaltered stream of seconds (upon which UTC - or an intermediate between UTC and various timezones should UTC fill this role as advocated - would base itself, as would any other applications that require said unaltered stream of seconds). This isn't even mentioning more far-fetched things like space travel (at which point the non-constant rotational parameters of an arbitrary planetary body are neither relevant nor appropriate for system-wide/galaxy-wide/universal/multiversal timekeeping).
- Gibbon1 11y ago
  The deal is the people chartered with the task of providing an accurate timebase are failing to do so because they are adding and subtracting arbitrary units of time. So if you actually need a monotonic timebase, you can't get it without having a human diligently subtracting leap seconds at random times. The proper thing to do is to generate a proper monotonic timebase and then publish a separate offset with microsecond or better resolution. Thus people that need monotonic time are happy and people that want to set the wall clocks are happy. Also seriously, leap seconds suck as an offset because a second is a huge amount of time for many applications.

ajross 11y ago

Offsets "generally don't matter" now, which is why this is an obscure bit of minutiae you're reading about on HN instead of NYT. But they matter to some applications, and those people have arguments trying to decide which to use. But yes: the ultimate solution if the world were to move to atomic/absolute clock synchronization instead of referencing the Earth's rotation is that every few hundred years we would need to adjust all the time zones by an hour to keep "noon" in the middle of the day. Given that we do this every decade or two anyway chasing DST vogues, I think this would be acceptable.

Trombone12 11y ago

It is the heavens that set the time for humanity, all else must either imitate or pick another name. Abandoning the leap seconds means breaking the connection between utc and what the people consider time to mean. It is not so much that the actual times drift apart very fast, it is that the clock tries to corrupt the meaning of the word "day". If leap seconds cause problems for your application, you probably should find another source of synchronisation signal.

yellowapple 11y ago
Yeah, another source like... seconds. Plenty of applications need to know a precise number of seconds (or milliseconds or nanoseconds) between the present and a past or future date/time. Leap seconds throw a wrench in that. Whether UTC should serve the role of an unaltered time source is indeed a matter of debate (and for good reason), but it's pretty clear that we do need an unaltered stream of seconds (upon which UTC - or an intermediate between UTC and various timezones should UTC fill this role as advocated - would base itself, as would any other applications that require said unaltered stream of seconds). This isn't even mentioning more far-fetched things like space travel (at which point the non-constant rotational parameters of an arbitrary planetary body are neither relevant nor appropriate for system-wide/galaxy-wide/universal/multiversal timekeeping).
Gibbon1 11y ago
The deal is the people chartered with the task of providing an accurate timebase are failing to do so because they are adding and subtracting arbitrary units of time. So if you actually need a monotonic timebase, you can't get it without having a human diligently subtracting leap seconds at random times. The proper thing to do is to generate a proper monotonic timebase and then publish a separate offset with microsecond or better resolution. Thus people that need monotonic time are happy and people that want to set the wall clocks are happy. Also seriously, leap seconds suck as an offset because a second is a huge amount of time for many applications.