A Faster Spinning Earth May Cause Timekeepers To Subtract a Second From World Clocks (apnews.com) 118
According to a new study published in the journal Nature, timekeepers may have to consider subtracting a second from our clocks around 2029 because the planet is rotating faster than it used to. The Associated Press reports: "This is an unprecedented situation and a big deal," said study lead author Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. "It's not a huge change in the Earth's rotation that's going to lead to some catastrophe or anything, but it is something notable. It's yet another indication that we're in a very unusual time." Ice melting at both of Earth's poles has been counteracting the planet's burst of speed and is likely to have delayed this global second of reckoning by about three years, Agnew said.
"We are headed toward a negative leap second," said Dennis McCarthy, retired director of time for the U.S. Naval Observatory who wasn't part of the study. "It's a matter of when." It's a complicated situation that involves, physics, global power politics, climate change, technology and two types of time. [...] McCarthy said the trend toward needing a negative leap second is clear, but he thinks it's more to do with the Earth becoming more round from geologic shifts from the end of the last ice age.
Three other outside scientists said Agnew's study makes sense, calling his evidence compelling. But Levine doesn't think a negative leap second will really be needed. He said the overall slowing trend from tides has been around for centuries and continues, but the shorter trends in Earth's core come and go. "This is not a process where the past is a good prediction of the future," Levine said. "Anyone who makes a long-term prediction on the future is on very, very shaky ground."
"We are headed toward a negative leap second," said Dennis McCarthy, retired director of time for the U.S. Naval Observatory who wasn't part of the study. "It's a matter of when." It's a complicated situation that involves, physics, global power politics, climate change, technology and two types of time. [...] McCarthy said the trend toward needing a negative leap second is clear, but he thinks it's more to do with the Earth becoming more round from geologic shifts from the end of the last ice age.
Three other outside scientists said Agnew's study makes sense, calling his evidence compelling. But Levine doesn't think a negative leap second will really be needed. He said the overall slowing trend from tides has been around for centuries and continues, but the shorter trends in Earth's core come and go. "This is not a process where the past is a good prediction of the future," Levine said. "Anyone who makes a long-term prediction on the future is on very, very shaky ground."
Leap Minutes (Score:3)
It would make more sense to allow time to drift up to say 40s, and then apply a leap minute.
This would only need to be done once every few decades, and there would be ample time
to prepare tech for the next time UTC is >40s out of sync with the earth's rotation.
Somebody did propose this idea a while back.
Re:Leap Minutes (Score:4, Insightful)
No, because then every system that would have to deal with differences between the clock and the actual time (eg solar panels, satellites, navigation, etc) would then require their own logic to handle the difference between observed and actual. Better to skip that complexity and just keep the time set to current.
Re: (Score:2)
Solar panels don't give a damn whether the clock is synchronized to the Earth's rotation to within a minute.
There's no reason whatsoever to have a leap second. All modern technology works on internal clocks. Nobody checks the Earth's rotation with respect to the sun to tell the time.
Re: (Score:1)
Everyone who does navigation does.
Or how do you fix your position on the earth by watching the sun or some stars without having the proper time?
FACEPALM
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, because if GPS fails (has never happened) the navigator on an ocean-going vessel is pulling out the sextant and pocket watch? And they better have that pocket watch sync'd to the millisecond, or they could be whole meters away from where GPS would say they are!
Or do you think they're just going to use their charts and last known position along with their speed and a stopwatch to draw a line, and if they're in any danger whatsoever maybe they cut the engine and send a radio message?
Anyone not in the m
I agree to let the error drift up... (Score:2)
Because we know the Earth to be slowing in the long term, so an increase is speed has to be a short-term glitch. How short term? I don't see it stretching beyond a second , unlikely to stretch to tens of seconds, and a UTC/UT1 difference of even 10 seconds is unlikely to be problematic.
On the other hand, we've only had clocks accurate enough to measure this for under 100 years, so saying that we understand Earth's rotation might be a stretch.
Re: (Score:2)
What I wonder although is how the heck/what could cause it to speed up? As you said, it should slow down and then even come in tidal lock with the Moon or the Sun eventually if the Sun stays in its current form long enough for that and for the Earth to still be around. I guess the Earth compressing onto itself (becoming more dense) could cause it to to speed up in rotation although so maybe it's just that.
Re: (Score:3)
What I wonder although is how the heck/what could cause it to speed up?
The core rotates slightly differently from the surface. Momentum transfer from the core to the mantle can make tiny changes in the surface rotation without changing the net angular momentum of the planet.
(there's also momentum exchange between the planet and the atmosphere as circulation patterns change, but that's pretty small.)
Re: (Score:1)
It is in the summary.
The melting ice does it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not that melting ice. The melting ice at the end of the last ice age:
'Galcial Rebound' is the best guess. (Score:2)
last ice age, there was heaps of ice around the poles, and that ice has mass. Over time, gravity pulled that mass down, which caused the ice free equator to bulge up. Then the ice age ended and the ice went away, and ever since then the planet has been adjusting - the equator pulling down and the poles raising up. Like the spinning ice skater pulling her arms in, the equator pulling in speeds the planet's spin up.
But if this was the case, why hasn't this been a steady speed up over the last hundred years? W
Re: (Score:3)
Nope. Horrible idea for multiple reasons:
a) We have a time scale that isn't corrected. If you need that, use that. Different time standards are used for different reasons.
b) 40 seconds is a huge amount of time when comparing certain events. E.g. it's the difference between seeing a calculated astronomical occlusion, and missing it by 39 seconds.
c) When we do something rarely we do something poorly. An activity that needs to be done frequently is managed and tested. An activity which is done rarely often goe
Re: (Score:2)
Nope. Horrible idea for multiple reasons: a) We have a time scale that isn't corrected. If you need that, use that.
It's not the time scale that isn't corrected. It's that the Earth's surface is ahead of where it would have been if the rotation was perfectly constant speed.
Unless your application cares what direction the Earth's surface is pointed to within an error of arc seconds, you don't care. If you do care to that accuracy, you're running enough computation that adding the offset is not a problem.
Different time standards are used for different reasons. b) 40 seconds is a huge amount of time when comparing certain events. E.g. it's the difference between seeing a calculated astronomical occlusion, and missing it by 39 seconds.
The timing would be right; the position on the Earth's surface would be off by tens of kilometers. If you're doing some
Re: (Score:1)
He is talking about how to handle a leap second versus a leap minute in computer systems, by software. ...
He is not talking about the earth rotation.
Obviously we all would be far better of, if we simply could stop earth for a second, and then let it keep running again
Re: (Score:2)
He is talking about how to handle a leap second versus a leap minute in computer systems, by software.
The easiest way to handle a leap second is to not institute a leap second because it is not needed and not useful.
He is not talking about the earth rotation.
The only reason to talk about a leap second or a leap minute is to synchronize the accurate clocks with the earth's rotation. So, yes, if you're talking about leap seconds, you are talking about the Earth's rotation.
Nobody cares that clocks are synchronized to the Earth's rotation to this absurd degree of accuracy except possibly astronomers, and anybody pointing a telescope to arcsecond accurac
Re: (Score:2)
The easiest way to handle a leap second is to not institute a leap second because it is not needed and not useful.
It is needed by definition. If you don't like UTC, don't use it. The idea that the world should change just because you don't want to use TAI is just asinine.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not the time scale that isn't corrected.
No. It's the time scale that isn't correct. We have multiple systems for keeping time. The expectation is that one of them aligns with the earth's rotation. Your proposal breaks the purpose of that time system since by its nature not only does it need to be corrected, but it always was corrected from its inception. UTC (the one being discussed here) was a direct successor to GMT (which was defined by the Greenwich observatory based on observations of the earth's rotation).
If you're doing something as complex as an asteroid occultation, which requires n-body orbital calculations, you can trivially include the actual Earth's rotation instead of assuming constant speed.
Indeed. Which is why they use UTC i
Re: (Score:1)
For a slow vessel a minute is already nearly one mile off on navigation.
For a fast vessle, like a passenger plane, it is 20 nautical miles or more.
Sorry, for anything important on this planet: it is completely unacceptable that clocks are nearly off one minute. 10 seconds would in many cases already be annoying. 1 seconds already super bad when you run distributed builds of a software system.
Re: (Score:2)
If your tech is using UTC for anything other than displaying the current time to the user, it's doing it wrong. There are several time standards already that don't have leap anythings.
Re: (Score:2)
The rarer the event is, the less experienced people are in doing it.
In other words, higher chances of mistakes since people do it maybe once a generation, and so less chance of any experience building up in terms of process, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
The only people who care are untechnic
Conspiracy theory (Score:3)
How much can I sell this theory to Alex Jones? "This Earth spin changes could explain dizzy spells. The earth's rotation is getting F'd up by windmills and that's causing dizziness and brain cancer. Especially when combined with 5G." And yes I am serious about selling the theory, as it would be much harder for me to make money off it than him.
Re: (Score:1)
How much can I sell this theory to Alex Jones? "This Earth spin changes could explain dizzy spells. The earth's rotation is getting F'd up by windmills and that's causing dizziness and brain cancer. Especially when combined with 5G." And yes I am serious about selling the theory, as it would be much harder for me to make money off it than him.
Sell it to Al Gore instead. He’s got the real clout in the bullshit game and you know it.
Re: (Score:2)
How much can I sell this theory to Alex Jones? "This Earth spin changes could explain dizzy spells. The earth's rotation is getting F'd up by windmills and that's causing dizziness and brain cancer. Especially when combined with 5G." And yes I am serious about selling the theory, as it would be much harder for me to make money off it than him.
It’s all a conspiracy to make programmers go insane trying to code this jumbled arcane pile of exceptions into a back end that has millions of users around the world with never any issues.
Re: (Score:2)
Really necessary? (Score:3)
We have positive leap seconds scheduled. Couldn't they just be cancelled out and/or postponed instead?
Re: (Score:2)
No. You can't postpone time.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see why not. The Doctor does it all the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes you can. The same mechanism that adds a second can be used to skip a second. The same system for slewing into a new correct time also works both ways. We haven't done it before, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
The Earth's girth is a shrinking (Score:3)
I think what is being said is those are all already completely cancelled for the foreseeable future.
While the ice at the poles continues to melt at pace, allowing the ground there to rise up, sinking the equator, so thereby driving a faster spin to conserve momentum, it is overpowering the slowing effect of the moon's tidal drag.
And that's what's so jaw dropping about it. Humans are now imparting more force on the planet than the Moon is!
Re: (Score:2)
That's.. impressive.
Re: (Score:2)
While the ice at the poles continues to melt at pace, allowing the ground there to rise up, sinking the equator, so thereby driving a faster spin to conserve momentum, it is overpowering the slowing effect of the moon's tidal drag.
And that's what's so jaw dropping about it. Humans are now imparting more force on the planet than the Moon is!
From TFA
Earth’s speeding up because its hot liquid core — “a large ball of molten fluid” — acts in unpredictable ways, with eddies and flows that vary, Agnew said.
Agnew said the core has been triggering a speedup for about 50 years, but rapid melting of ice at the poles since 1990 masked that effect. Melting ice shifts Earth’s mass from the poles to the bulging center, which slows the rotation much like a spinning ice skater slows when extending their arms out to their sides, he said.
This makes sense because when the ice melts there is no significant change in local pressure since gravity stays the same and the total deformation is small compared to the mass moment water moving (generally) toward the equator. Think of it like the way ice floating and melting does not change the water level. It’s the core that’s speeding things up and the water moving toward the equator causes, largely by human caused climate change, was subtracting off that increase. The moon on
Re: (Score:2)
Effective crust thickness changes - from ice loss. Even if no change in gravity, that means the remaining crust must rise to equalise.
Re: (Score:2)
Effective crust thickness changes - from ice loss. Even if no change in gravity, that means the remaining crust must rise to equalise.
Sure, but think of how this happens, the crust is floating on the liquid underneath, all else equal you are just moving the floaty bit from one location to another. That won’t change the level anywhere else. The effect of moving the mass on the surface from the poles toward the equator is far greater than any other redistribution difference makes in the final mass moment.
Re: (Score:2)
Floaty bits sink according mass. Stack something on top it sinks. Take the stack away, it rises back up.
It's the stacking, or effective crust thickness, that is significant.
Re:Really necessary? (Score:5, Informative)
We have positive leap seconds scheduled. Couldn't they just be cancelled out and/or postponed instead?
No we don't. We have a schedule for where a positive leap second *may* be added. At present none are proposed. It has already been confirmed that in June there won't be one. It hasn't been confirmed for December yet, but the issue here is that not adding a second isn't enough. We haven't added a second since 2016.
Re: Really necessary? (Score:2)
No, we don't have positive leap seconds scheduled. Whether or not a leap second will be introduced is determined by the International Earth Rotation Service and announced about 6 months in advance (no earlier) in their Bulliten C.
See the IERS bullitens for more info: https://www.iers.org/IERS/EN/P... [iers.org]
Who needed that? Just wait for the next leap sec (Score:2)
What use required the local time to be precisely synchronised with Earth's rotation down to the second?
What system would malfunction if the sun is not exactly at its highest point when the local time is precisely noon at that second? Actually, that would be the case anyway for 3599/3600 of each timezone anyway, so who cares? The difference is only which 1/3600 slice of a timezone see 12:00:00 on their clock when the sun reached the peak.
What's the problem of just waiting until the next leap second to canc
Re: (Score:1)
None. This is just another "AGW is fucking up the planet" story from /.
Re: (Score:2)
The local time already differs from solar time by 1-2 hours in most places, by more in eg. China. And use cases that actually care about accuracy already apply their corrections, with far more precision that legal time could reasonably do.
Re: (Score:2)
Banking?
From my albeit limited understanding, I'll try an example: any transaction made by a New York bank in a bank at Los Angeles has to be done within 200 milliseconds or faster (digitally). Also the other way around of course. Proper time-keeping is therefore pretty important for any type of banking. The U.S.A. has the most strict rules or even laws about the duration of this transaction period globally.
Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead of faffing around, do this:
1. Install a quantum gas clock as the planetary timekeeper. It's much more accurate than an atomic clock. Place this at the Greenwich Observatory.
2. Agree on a fixed alignment as the start of a day.
3. Place a sensor at Greenwich which detects when that alignment occurs. This resets the counter for the quantum gas clock, so a second always starts when the alignment occurs.
4. Synchronise all atomic clocks to the quantum gas clock.
There is now a daily reset which is at a much higher resolution than most computer clocks (but within the nanosecond resolution Linux supports). The system itself adds and removes fractions of a second as needed with no need of political decisions. This correction will always be smaller than natural clock drift, so is inside the error bar software is already designed to handle.
The most important fact you should know about time (Score:2)
People do not understand time and neither do you.
Re: (Score:2)
Just ignore leap seconds entirely. Use TAI, which is like UTC but without the leap seconds. If you need UTC, convert TAI to it using a database of when leap seconds happened.
Expect stuff to break as software that can't deal with 61 seconds in a minute chokes.
We should just not bother with leap seconds in UTC for the next 100 years. Worst case, we end up with midnight a minute or two out from where the rotation of the Earth relative to the sun says it should be.
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Expect stuff to break as software that can't deal with 61 seconds in a minute chokes.
Leap seconds are common. Any software that doesn't deal with them is buggy.
Most software needing precise timing uses "timeval" which is the number of microseconds since 1/1/1979. That doesn't change with leap seconds. Leap seconds only affect the conversion of a timeval to a YYYY:MM:DD "datetime".
Leap second [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
You would be surprised how much software is buggy.
Using the interval since an epoch is a good idea, assuming you never need to handle dates from before that epoch, but the UTC/human readable conversion is still an issue because there is no way to predict leap seconds. They have to be programmed in and the database updated every time there is a new one.
There have been 27 leap seconds so far, so if time is passed between software as microseconds since an epoch then the display can be up to 27 seconds out.
Re: (Score:2)
Leap seconds are common. Any software that doesn't deal with them is buggy.
You've just declared all software buggy. The issue with the leap second is it can't be calculated in advance. If and when a decision needs to be made for leap second to be added, an update needs to be pushed somewhere.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, here in the southern hemisphere we are celebrating Good Friday eve, where we commemorate the death of the Julian Calendar.
Those who regard the Gregorian Calendar as a heresy won't celebrate until over a month from now.
The last thing we need is another schism. Trust the science!
How do you measure accuracy? (Score:2)
"Install a quantum gas clock as the planetary timekeeper. It's much more accurate than an atomic clock"
I'veoften wondered - how do they know. What do they compare a new clock against to see if its more accurate because they've only got the supposedly less accurate clock to do that with.
Wouldn't it be simpler to simply declare a second as a single tick of a certain type of clock and leave it at that? Then those clocks would be accurate for all time.
Re: (Score:2)
The chief benefit of a quantum gas clock is that it is able to measure time accurately enough to measure even small relativistic effects. (The change in the speed of time from a vertical displacement of ten feet is observable.)
Redefining a second according to such clocks won't cause any serious headaches - most users won't notice the difference, and those who would likely already use quantum gas clocks.
But it would make a difference in what they publish, as the intervals of time would have genuine meaning.
Re: (Score:2)
A second is defined as 9 192 631 770 "ticks" of a cesium atom. You don't want to base it on something that only ticks once a second because it's hard to measure small inaccuracies with a standard that coarse. Even mechanical watches typically tick twenty or thirty thousand times per second, and that cheap Timex quartz is 32 768 / s.
Re: (Score:3)
With this system in place, the first really cloudy day would shift the day around based on when the sensor can see light.. you'd get all kinds of time paradox errors when it shifted backward with no warning. These things need to be planned.
Also, if you are resynchronizing a clock every day, it doesn't have to be an atomic one to stay accurate, it just needs not to have its power interrupted. It barely even has to be an electronic one.
Re: (Score:2)
First, water vapour is opaque at visible frequencies, but the sun emits over a very wide band, most of which will totally ignore clouds. For something like this, you'd use radio astronomy. The sun is a superb radio source, easily strong enough to compete with terrestrial sources, especially if you pick the right frequency.
Second, no it wouldn't. It wouldn't be triggered by the presence of detecting light on the optical spectrum, but the presence of a specific alignment. So you only ever synchronise when you
Re: (Score:2)
You just designed a system that requires every clock to always synchronise to something else. That's just not always possible, you have no idea just how many systems you are breaking by saying a Stratum-0 source can change.
Re: (Score:2)
There's already time like that.
You have atomic time (TA0? TA1?) that's time kept by atomic clocks. You also have solar time, which is what time it is by the earth's rotation.
The two are kept in check by leap seconds when they drift half a second or so.
The problem is, earth's rotation is irregular and changes all the time based on what's happening in the world and in space.
This difference is recorded all the time because sometimes you do want solar time.
Re: (Score:2)
Solar time, i.e. setting noon as the time when the sun is due south, is not set by the earth's rotation alone. Solar time is also affected by the tilt of earth's axis of rotation and earth's basically elliptical revolution around the sun, and so the length of a solar day varies a little during the year, while the rotational speed is closer to being constant.
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
Close.
TAI is kept by atomic clocks, one second per second. Solar time is kept by observation of the sun. The two aren't synchronized, they drift apart. There's also sideral time, which is kept by observation of the stars, which also drifts relative to the other two.
Then there are a bunch of things in between.
UT is based on a particular measurement of sidereal time.
UTC is based on TAI but fudged periodically to approximate UT.
GPS time is used by US GPS satellites, equal to TAI plus the UTC offset at the time GPS came online.
UTC is a decent thing to set your watch to. It's easy to calculate from GPS or TAI, the calculation only needs to be updated occasionally, and it approximates sidereal time well enough to navigate or point a small telescope. UTC is an approximation that's reasonable for human scales. Timing critical applications should use TAI, GPS or similar, not UTC. Anybody bitching about leap seconds shouldn't be working on such things.
Re: (Score:3)
That's called solar time, or sidereal time, depending on whether you define "a fixed alignment as the start of the day" based on the stars or the sun. Both of those are kept, and are available. You can set your watch to either, if you choose. You can also set your watch to Greenwich Mean Time, which is the yearly average.
It's often impractical to synchronize clocks so frequently, so we invented UTC, which is the atomic time synched to a modern equivalent of GMT whenever they drift about a second apart.
NTP (i.e. Dr Mills) foresaw this (Score:5, Interesting)
Full Disclosure:
I was a very active member of the NTP Hackers team for 25+ years, network time protocol did foresee the possibility of both positive and negative leap seconds. Among other things, there's a two-bit field in every server packet where two of the four combinations indicate an upcoming plus or minus leap second, to be applied at the next UTC midnight.
That said, I am 99%+ sure that we will _not_ subtract any leap seconds in the next 100 years, and the reason is very simple:
Too many systems would fail very badly!
Over longer time scales, the Earth's rotation _will_ slow down further, adding positive leap seconds, and correcting this more short-scale speedup would therefore happen automatically. However, this is almost certainly moot because we will abolish leap seconds completely, and instead require astronomers and others who care a lot about the offset between UTC and UT1 to maintain their own tables.
Currently, GPS sats all transmit the UTC-UT1 offset in a field which can only cover about a second, so what we have been doing over the last 40 years is to measure said offset and when it got above ~0.6 seconds, the IERTS would announce a positive leap second so that the offset became -0.4 instead.
Terje
Re: (Score:2)
Can you comment on the rumours that nobody can understand the NTP algorithms anymore beyond the core team, and that the team is also ageing and will retire soon, leaving us in the future with the only solution of a shitty proprietary replacement from google or microsoft?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Untrue.
The Microsoft one only works if you buy a 365 subscription and hit the new CoPilot key, while the Google time protocol was entirely cancelled 2 years after they got a bunch of people to switch to it and left hanging.
Re: (Score:2)
Why does something as funny as that get modded down? Are they actually paying people for this, or is it just shills, or just stupid people?
Re: (Score:2)
This. On both points:
- First, the speed-up is almost certainly very temporary, and will just compensate a later need for adding a leap second.
- Second, UTC is what most people and systems care about. Pretty much only astronomers (and only a few of them) care about UT1. They can add the necessary compensation into their systems.
Even if we decide to keep leap seconds (which we shouldn't), they should never be visible outside the time-keeping centers. The difference can easily be "smeared" across larger
Re: (Score:2)
Even if there were good reasons to use DST, it should be smeared similarly over let's say a month or so. However, there are no good reasons and although the majority of EU decided to abandon it, there was a couple of South-European countries not supporting it, so we couldn't get rid of it. It was also drowned out in the Wuhan flu epidemic, later known as Covid-19 due to the extreme lobbying by the CPP to shift the blame away from China even though the truth eventually surfaced, and things they campaigned on
Re: (Score:2)
"Even if there were good reasons to use DST...However, there are no good reasons"
Sez you. As I get older and my night vision gets worse, I appreciate more and more having another hour of daylight in the evening. But I don't appreciate having my mornings in the dark. Keeping sunrise more or less at the same time over the course of a year requires Daylight Saving Time.
Re: (Score:2)
NTP has absolutely nothing to do with local time and/or daylight savings: It works only in UTC, but with corrections to handle and propagate leap second events.
Terje
Re: (Score:2)
Smearing the leap second is a solution Google came up with for their own data centers when they realized that they had too many protocols that didn't know how to handle UTC leaps properly, it really cannot be applied generally unless everyone can agree on exactly how to do it.
In my own test code, I did the smearing over a 24 hour period, centered around the leap event. The main arguments here are on how to determine an optimal smearing function: You want a gradual increase, then a mostly constant slope peri
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No. You are thinking of Harlan Stenn who took over the lead role more than 15 years ago. He does not live in Nebraska though, instead he migrates a bit between Oregon and California (Silicon Valley). Otherwise that comic is _exactly_ right!
Terje
Re: (Score:2)
That said, I am 99%+ sure that we will _not_ subtract any leap seconds in the next 100 years, and the reason is very simple:
Too many systems would fail very badly!
You're assuming the way we do something is the way we will continue to do something. There's already several active systems in place to correct clocks without a jump positive or negative, and they are used in far more computers already than you can imagine. E.g. All AWS systems, all Azure systems, and all Google systems, services, and APIs. These have not used leap seconds for 15 years now. They implement a some form of time smear, one which doesn't care if the leap second is positive or negative.
And it al
Re: (Score:2)
Please re-read what I wrote: Smearing works perfectly well in an environment where you control both the (smearing) server(s) _and_ the clients!
If you can make sure that all your clients reduce their poll interval before the smearing starts, then you can track any reasonable smearing trajectory, without ever getting more than a ms or so away from your reference, and consequently, all your peers in the same environment.
For a global/pool server, the NTP Hackers would prefer all this to just work, with all cloc
Clearly anthropogenic! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Build a big reflecting sail and attach it to Earth, will slow it down and take care of global warming by reflecting heat into space. /s
I can solve this ... (Score:4, Funny)
.... just gimme a second!
(I'll show myself out ... )
Re: (Score:2)
.... just gimme a second!
(I'll show myself out ... )
I'm glad we're actually taking a second away from you instead. :-p
Timekeeping politics (Score:2)
I wish we'd finally end the dependency on legacy time keeping and just standardize on seconds for everything. We can use standard SI scale multipliers and if we want some fixed reference, we could use what our computers use, the Unix Epoch signifying the dawn of a new era counting from 1970-01-01 00:00:00.000 UTC onwards. In terms of formatting it compactly, I'd recommend base36 as the biggest standard base using just case-insensitive standard characters of 0-9a-z. My demo of it is here: https://sorsacode.c [sorsacode.com]
What systems need this? (Score:2)
If this is something that is +/- 1 second on a few years timescale, what systems rely on getting the earths rotational speed correct to that level over a few years? Do GPS systems require it? Maybe some geodesy studies would need to account for it?
Leap second is a strange name for it (Score:2)
A leap year is actually the addition of a single day. Why do we call this a leap second if the entire second is removed? And, what is wrong with just letting days stay brighter for 1 second?
And if we are this obsessed with accuracy, what to do about atomic clocks?
Re: (Score:2)
The calendar year doesn't match the length of the solar year, because the basic unit of calendar timekeeping is the day... and the year is not evenly divisible by days. Leap years periodically add a day to make up for the approximately .24 of a day we're short on the calendar every year.
Leap seconds, on the other hand, adjust the calendar timing because the days themselves have changed. They're also not adding a second per day, this is a second added (or subtracted) whenever the calendar has slipped relat
Late (Score:2)
Turns out it really is later than you think.
Taller Chairs (Score:2)
Maybe we should get everyone to use taller chairs.
You spin my head right round, right round (Score:2)
You spin my head right round, right round
When you go down, when you go down down
Re: (Score:3)
When you go down, when you go down down
High UID checks out. Us children of the 80s remember the original. [wikipedia.org] Besides, vinyl records are back [slashdot.org], so the original lyrics are still just as relevant today:
You spin me right 'round, baby, right 'round
Like a record, baby, right 'round, 'round, 'round
You spin me right 'round, baby, right 'round
Like a record, baby, right 'round, 'round, 'round
Re: (Score:2)
Spin? Could be hard for today’s generation to grasp the concept when most 21st century vinyl hangs on a wall as art. Closest a needle got was the push pin holding up the jacket lyrics hanging in a whitewash colored frame ironically in the shape of a record player.
Re: (Score:2)
In this timeline, vinyl is outselling CDs. The most popular dance music radio station in my area (c89.5) is currently running a fundraiser and if you donate 30/month your reward will be a music compilation on special neon green vinyl...
Re: (Score:2)
I'm so dizzy my head is spinning
Like a whirlpool, it never ends
And it's you, girl, making it spin
You're making me dizzy
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Now excuse me, while I kiss this guy...
Re: (Score:2)
Cut him some slack - he thinks there's a bathroom on the right, and on the way to the Stairway to Heaven, there's a wino down the road.
Now excuse me, while I kiss this guy...
LOL. Like Rob Halford singing Raking the Lawn. Once you hear it you can never unhear it.
Re: (Score:2)
But why is the Earth speeding up?
It should be slowing down as polar ice melts and mass spreads out across the ocean.
Melting alpine glaciers will speed up the rotation, but much less alpine ice is melting than polar ice.
Re: (Score:2)
You spin my head right round, right round When you go down, when you go down down
Damn. Do you realize I have to Eric Cartman my way through the entire Pitch Perfect movie because of you now!
Re:I'm waiting (Score:4, Insightful)
While some people make too much fuss, there is zero ligitimate reason for daylight saving now. Its just a pointless annoyance that seems to remain simply for historical reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
Once you put a large-scale policy in place, it's hard to roll it back. Some people are bound to like it better than the prior arrangement. It's just human nature.
Re: (Score:2)
> there is zero ligitimate reason for daylight saving now
https://siepr.stanford.edu/pub... [stanford.edu]
https://www.brookings.edu/arti... [brookings.edu]
https://cpisecurity.com/blog/s... [cpisecurity.com]
https://www.findlaw.com/legalb... [findlaw.com]
Re: (Score:2)
One thing that is really funny is when you replace one arbitrary thing that jumps between two state with a fixed arbitrary thing, and then try and agree on the outcome. There's no technical reason for DST. It's arbitrary, and people don't like it. But get to DST haters in a room and ask them what time should be adopted, summer time or winter time. The arbitrary nature of it will lead to yet another argument.
The thing about arbitrary ideas is there's no legitimate reason for any choice to be made about them.
Re: (Score:2)
While some people make too much fuss, there is zero ligitimate reason for daylight saving now. Its just a pointless annoyance that seems to remain simply for historical reasons.
I suspect it is because of the psychological effect it has on people. I note that I feel "dazed and confused" for up to a month after the time change. Something just doesn't feel right. I assume that is the desired effect.