[LEAPSECS] Toasting Unix timestamp 1234567890

Zefram zefram at fysh.org
Sat Feb 14 13:06:59 EST 2009


M. Warner Losh wrote:

>I'd phrase these like so:

>

>UTC's 1970 and 1971 together had 63072001.999918 SI seconds (exactly).


That's not quite true. They had that many *TAI* seconds, but TAI seconds
are not equal to SI seconds. TAI is an imperfect realisation of the
SI second. UTC(TT) is a mildly interesting notion.


>The TAI time scale ticked 63072001.999918 SI seconds (exactly), while

>UTC ticked 63072000 "seconds" between 00:00:00 1970-01-01 UTC and

>00:00:00 1972-01-01 UTC.


UTC ticked some 63072000.107757997 seconds in that time. Of greater
relevance is that UTC ticked exactly 730 days (as you indicate).

So many nits to pick.

-zefram


More information about the LEAPSECS mailing list