

Nations Convene to Decide the Fate of a Second - NaOH
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/science/to-keep-or-kill-lowly-leap-second-focus-of-world-debate.html

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dodedo
"But Britain, along with Canada and China, would like to keep the current
keeping system, arguing that, in the 40 years that leap seconds have been
gracefully inserted in our midst — most recently in 2008 — there have been no
problems to speak of, and the worriers have greatly exaggerated the potential
for havoc. Remember Y2K?"

No problems? He must not be aware of the 2008 adjtimex() bug in the linux
kernel: <https://lkml.org/lkml/2009/1/2/389>

This bug brought down nearly 100k systems for my employer at midnight UTC,
worldwide, in unison. It was not a fun evening.

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luser001
Hmm, the proposal to do away with the leap second seems yet another instance
of humanity's practice of taking decisions that are expedient in the short
term but will create problems in the long term (sun rises at noon in a few
thousand years?!)

Every computer in the past several years I've installed (Windows, Mac, Linux)
has had NTP enabled. Almost every cell phone ships with "set time from
network" enabled. Wristwatches sales are way down => few people set their
watches manually.

Keep the leap second! :)

~~~
modeless
The sun rising at noon in the far future long after we're all dead is not a
problem for us, and it wouldn't be a problem for the people living in that
future either. On the other hand, software bugs due to unnecessary complexity
are an actual problem, now and in the future.

~~~
luser001
Umm, I think your comment exhibits exactly the attitude I was arguing against.
I'm not smart enough to argue conclusively why one should care about what
happens after one's death, but this greek proverb moved me a lot.

    
    
        A society grows great when old men plant trees
        whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
    

Example: <http://www.gardinclothing.com/blog/?p=31>

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marshray
Astronomical observations at small resolutions of time already have to
compensate for so many variables that the current leap second system does not
help them any. Seriously, look at the formulae and data collected by these
guys <http://www.iers.org/> and then say "astronomers need leap seconds to
point their telescopes".

More likely, somewhere some budget for astronomers will be reduced by the move
to a terrestrial source of time.

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jaylevitt
The author sounds knowledgeable, but the reference to Y2K as an overreaction
makes me think he hasn't a clue.

Kenneth, boychik... how much effort do you think it took to make sure Y2K
_didn't_ become a memorable problem?

~~~
silon3
We'll have to reset everything at Y10K anyway.

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wl
I'm wondering why people are trying to get the leap second removed from UTC.
If people have situations where leap seconds are problematic, why not just
switch to TAI which already doesn't have leap seconds?

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bdonlan
It's because too many things are defined in terms of UTC; if you start saying,
"Okay, let's start using TAI from now on.", now you have the complexity of
trying to remember whether you're supposed to use TAI or UTC for this
particular protocol and/or data format, so in practice people will stick with
UTC there.

On the other hand, removing leap seconds from UTC is trivial - they're
inserted manually anyway, so you just stop doing it.

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Someone
'required' (if only for the sentence starting with "As a time-nut, a small and
crazy fraternity") reading: <http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1967009>

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d0mine
Epoch time vs. time of day
<http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/epochtime.html>

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pygy_
Why don't we recalibrate the atomic clocks, that are systematically running
late?

I assume that the variations in the Earth's rotations are not predictable, and
that it is this impossible to do it exactly, but they could be conservatively
slowed down in order to increase the delay between leap seconds.

~~~
ars
The earth is slowing down. No matter how you calibrate the clocks, you'll
constantly have to change it. At some point the second was accurate to the
earth.

And in any case the second is very precisely defined based on physical objects
(specifically how long it takes an atom of cesium to oscillate a specific
number of times).

Changing it would ripple through all sorts of things, for example the length
of objects would change (or more accurately the number we use to measure the
length of an object would be different). The number used to represent the
length of an object is based on how far light travels in a certain amount of
time. Change that time, you change how far the light traveled, which would
then give a new definition for how long a meter is.

~~~
pygy_
Then define two types of seconds.

* The reference second, used for the metric system definitions and science in general.

* The real-life second, based on the rotation of the earth.

If you want to keep a Cesium reference for every day time, you can define the
second as either 9,192,631,770 or 9,192,631,771 oscillations in a given
proportion. X short seconds followed by Y long seconds, with the X/Y ratio
decreasing daily. When X becomes 0, increment both numbers and start over.

~~~
ars
Are you trolling? Joking?

A: How exactly do you propose changing the speed of millions of clocks
worldwide to match your new second?

B: Given that the entire difference is one second every year or so, I guess
they could just adjust by one second every once in a while. i.e. you are back
where you started.

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learc83
Why can't we just add a leap minute every century, or a leap ten minutes every
millennium?

