Vote To Eliminate Leap Seconds

Mortimer.CA writes "As discussed on Slashdot previously, there is a proposal to remove leap seconds from UTC (nee 'Greenwich' time). It will be put to a vote to ITU member states during 2008, and if 70% agree, the leap second will be eliminated by 2013. There is some debate as to whether this change is a good or bad idea. The proposal calls for a 'leap-hour' in about 600 years, which nobody seems to believe is a good idea. One philosophical point opponents make is that the 'official' time on Earth should match the time of the sun and heavens."

Wait

[Monkeys!!! (831558)]

Just hang on a sec....

Chrono-noobs!

[hedgemage (934558)]

I've been keeping time with my sundial and temple-top observatory the way Ra intended! Damn you kids and your new-fangled timekeeping.

Why not just make each second a little longer?

[drgroove (631550)]

I thought of this issue years ago, and had actually sat down and done the math at one point... basically, to solve the time discrepancy, just slightly lengthen the second. Everything lines up. Of course, every book, piece of software, scientific instrument, medical equipment, ... well, basically everything in human civilization ... would need to be re-build, re-calibrated, re-programmed, re-manufactured, etc. If nothing else, we'd stimulate the living hell out of the world's economy.

Re:Why not just make each second a little longer?

[mbone (558574)]

Of course, the real problem is that the rotation of the Earth is not constant (the leap seconds are mostly driven by fluid motions in the core).

Originally, back in the 1960's, instead of the leap seconds, they (the BIH at the time) adjusted the rate of the UTC seconds with respect to TAI. This was widely viewed as not a good thing once it was tried and was dropped, IIRC in 1972.

Re:Don't have to.

[SnowZero (92219)]

You're off by a factor of 3600. It's "leap hours" that are being proposed; We already have leap seconds. Of course, I'm not sure the math from TFA makes too much sense anyway, as I don't recall having an average of 3 or 6 leap seconds every year.

Other way

[professorfalcon (713985)]

How about going the other way... leap microseconds. Many times during the day. Then nobody will hardly notice.

Re:Other way

[4D6963 (933028)]

How about going the other way... leap microseconds. Many times during the day. Then nobody will hardly notice.

Actually it sounds like a good idea. As someone else suggested, the difference due to leap seconds is so small that only atomic clocks are precise enough to need to take them into account. And since we're all synced on atomic clocks anyways we could just make that happen transparently upstream.

What would be wrong with

[maroberts (15852)]

A leap minute every 10 years (or so)?

One event every 10 years does not cause lots of disruption, and being a minute out of sync with solar time is not large enough to be a problem. You'd notice an hour's difference if you're in a northerly latitude and have Daylight Saving Time...

This is why...

[MegaMahr (788652)]

This is why I refuse to set the time on my VCR...

A 'leap-hour' in about 600 years

[niceone (992278)]

Yeah, because the best way to to deal with a small problem is to put it off until it becomes a really big problem.

Please take some care with editing...

[Mantle (104724)]

... which nobody seems to believe is a good idea.

Um... isn't the whole point of this article that some people think it's a good idea? TFS even says there is debate over whether it is a good or bad idea!

What a number of people don't realize...

[swamp_ig (466489)]

The leap second is required because the earth's spin is slowing down in a complex, non-linear way.

Changing the length of the second simply won't work, in a couple of hundred years we'll be right back to where we started again. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second [wikipedia.org] for details.

The leap hour is a daft idea, why change something that isn't broken, if a tad inconvenient.

How about DST

[Trogre (513942)]

I don't really care what they do with leap seconds, but IMO their time would be better spent abolishing that routine-breaking, parent-killing, accident-causing abomination which is Daylight Savings Time.

The only benefits I can see is slightly later barbecues in summer and a six-monthly reminder to check smoke detector batteries about the house.

Re:How about DST

[julesh (229690)]

DST is set by local governments. This is an entirely different thing, an international standards body messing around with time, instead.

BTW: I'm of the opinion that it's not DST that should be abolished, but non-DST. Non-DST time is a good mathematical division of the day, centred equally around 12:00 (+- 30mins). Unfortunately, as a society, we seem to have decided to centre our actual lives around 13:00 instead. Switching permanently to DST would fix this.

Simple and accurate solution

[by Anonymous Coward]

Run computers on TAI (International Atomic Time). Keep it constantly flowing, and never add or remove seconds, as per the definition. Then simply calculate UTC in software from a published leap offset between the two, which compensates for the leap seconds:

UTC = TAI - leapseconds

Then define all the timezones off of UTC as normal. All this basically does, is make the calculations for the timezones into a few hours plus or minus a few seconds. This makes a lot more sense, because then you actually have a fundamental time (TAI) which doesn't have discontinuities, but if you want to consider your astronomical orientation, you look at UTC or your local time. We don't need to redefine these types of time, because these already exist. We just need to use them more intelligently.

Re:Metric time?

[daeley (126313)]

The French tried Decimal time [wikipedia.org] (aka French Revolutionary Time) for a while, although of course the Chinese invented it [wikipedia.org].

Decimal time always reminds me of the scene in Metropolis with two clocks on the office wall [wikipedia.org] -- a 24-hour clock and a 10-hour clock (the length of the workers' shifts).

Your post - Bollocks

[janrinok (846318)]

We used to have 120 pence to the pound in the UK

There were 240 pence to the old (pre-decimalisation) pound, comprised of 20 shillings each worth 12 (old) pence. Do you remember guineas, crowns, half-crowns, shillings, tanners (6-penny piece), threepenny bit, pennies, half-pennies, farthings (a quarter penny)? I do. I suspect that I am quite a bit older than you and I cannot ever remember there being 120 pence to the pound. So either please provide a citation or confess that you are mistaken/talking bollocks. :-)

But the main thrust of your post was correct with regards to dividing sums of money easily. Or at least it was until the education system decided that mathematics and mental arithmetic were not the most important subjects in life. I'm not sure how some of today's young people could cope with such problems.

Re:Metric time?

[Amiralul (1164423)]

Or better, wake up at 256, eat lunch at 512 andd GOTO sleep at 1024.

Re:Yup.

[arth1 (260657)]

It gets worse than that, even.

What is a year?

Is it the time from perihelion to the next perihelion?
Is it the time from zenith on the shortest day to zenith on the shortest day next year?
Is it the time for when a star within our galaxy is in the same position again?
Is it the time for when a star outside our galaxy is in the same position again?

The earth's orbit rotates, and the solar system rotates, in a galaxy that rotates. And speculation is that the universe rotates too.

Re:Yup.

[aproposofwhat (1019098)]

Oblig. Python quote:

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

Re:Metric time?

[Slashidiot (1179447)]

Yay, imperial time!

The smallest unit is the "Moment", and then the "While" (or, less used, the "Whilst"). A while is about 14.4 moments. Then you have the "long while", which is 13.8 whiles, then the "time", and "long time"...

For example, it took me a while and three moments to write this comment. I'm not a quick typer...

Re:year 2612 bug anyone?

[aevan (903814)]

In other news, people in 2612 voted to put off the issue of 'leap hours' until 16412, where they propose to add a 'leap day', ostensibly in February.

Re:year 2612 bug anyone?

[Warg! The Orcs!! (957405)]

16412 is also a leap year The extra day in February would be the ultra rare 30th of February. It's worth doing even if you have to wait 14405 years for it work.

Re:They have to add a leap something, sometime

[evanbd (210358)]

Leap years are to deal with correcting the length of the year, which isn't an integral number of days. Leap seconds [wikipedia.org] are to deal with the fact that the length of a day changes slowly and at a variable rate. It's not the same problem at all.

Re:Steer the Earth

[4D6963 (933028)]

We could just fire off some nukes every six months or year to control the orbital speed of the earth around the sun.

Congratulations, you completely failed to understand the fundamental difference between a day and a year! A feat accomplished by few to this day!

What defines the day is the rotation speed of the Earth around itself, not the orbital speed around the Sun. Besides, as some other people pointed out, this whole leap second thing is irregular, or if you prefer, one step forward, one step back, because the speed of rotation of the Earth varies slightly.