4 ms·
Could someone explain to me why the leap seconds can't simply be inserted on the leap day in February? Never mind, that just makes way too much sense I assume :
by x0054 11y ago
Could someone explain to me why the leap seconds can't simply be inserted on the leap day in February? Never mind, that just makes way too much sense I assume :) Just like not having daylight savings time, or 30 min offset time zones, or months with either 31 or 30 days, mostly arrange in a random order.
My ideal time system would have 13 months, with 12 30 days months plus 1 end of the year month with either 5 or 6 days (plus an occasional leap second). An no damn daylight savings time. Of course, it would make a lot of sense to put the beginning of the year at the beginning of the first month of spring, not the _second_ month of winter. But again, nothing about modern calendar makes much sense. You begin to realize how insane it is only when you are forced to write a time library from scratch in C++ as part of a C++ course. I did that in high school, and it was really eye opening.
- ams6110 11y agoA good lesson on why it's almost always a bad idea to write your own time-handling code, or to represent time as an integer instead of a proper date/time datatype in whatever language or database you're using.
- duskwuff 11y agoBecause leap seconds aren't inserted on a regular, predictable schedule. They're inserted irregularly, based on astronomical observations, to account for irregularities in the Earth's rotation.
- WalterGR 11y agoThat doesn't seem to be the case, at least for UTC. (Do scientists use a special calendar that reflects Leap Seconds more quickly?) http://datacenter.iers.org/eop/-/somos/5Rgv/getTX/16/bulletinc-049.txt http://datacenter.iers.org/eop/-/somos/5Rgv/getTX/16/bulleti... "Leap seconds can be introduced in UTC at the end of the months of December or June, depending on the evolution of UT1-TAI. Bulletin C is mailed every six months, either to announce a time step in UTC or to confirm that there will be no time step at the next possible date." (That said, saving them up until the next Leap Year would mean a maximum discovery-to-implementation interval of 8 years, rather than the current 1 year max.)
- duskwuff 11y agoI meant "irregularly" inasmuch as the presence or absence of a leap second doesn't follow a strict pattern -- it's not "regular" in the way that leap years are.
- micampe 11y agoSounds like you would have been a good fit for working at Kodak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar