nanog mailing list archives

Re: F-ckin Leap Seconds, how do they work?


From: Eugen Leitl <eugen () leitl org>
Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2012 12:31:05 +0200

On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 06:10:45PM -0400, William Herrin wrote:

IMO, leap seconds are a really bad idea. Let the vanishingly few
people who care about a precision match against the solar day keep
track of the deviation from clock time and let everybody else have a
*simple* clock year after year. When the deviation increases to an
hour every what, thousand years? Then you can do a big, well
publicized correction where everybody is paying attention to making it
work instead of being caught by surprise.

Notice that already InterplaNet requires a time base not linked to
a particular planetary body. If we're looking at kiloyear
scales, then either nobody will care about celestial dynamics
of a particular planetary body, or nobody will care about
precise time standards any longer.


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