[LEAPSECS] Coming of age in the solar system

[Michael Sokolov]

M. Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:


> Except on leap second day, when the sexagesimalliness breaks with an

> irregular radix.


Yup, that's why I seriously dislike leap seconds and prefer rubber
seconds instead.  (By the latter I mean something like Marcus Kuhn's
UTS aka UTC-SLS.)


> In effect, the proposal to stop inserting leap

> seconds restores this invariant that goes back to the Sumerians by

> eliminating the irregular radix :)


Except that the cure (disconnecting the concept of a day from the
sunrise/sunset cycle) is worse than the disease (the leap second
silliness).  Rubber seconds a la UTS/UTC-SLS eliminate the 23:59:60
insanity *without* killing mean solar time.

But at least with the darned leap seconds my time_t disagrees with UTC
"legal time" only during the short interval during which I make my
time_t clock advance by 10 units over the course of 11 SI seconds; if
ITU has their way, I and the world will set out on a course of ever-
increasing time drift.

(That is, at the present time I schedule a batch of 10 elongated seconds,
each equal to 1.1 SI s in duration, at the same time when Daniel Gambis
schedules a leap second.  But I am fully prepared to do it on my own:
when the evil ITU comes forward to take away Monsieur Gambis' authority
to issue leap seconds, I will NOT bend over like a submissive and switch
to living my life on a timescale that's decoupled from MST.  Instead I
will simply start scheduling elongated or perhaps shortened time_t
seconds on my non-POSIX UNIX systems on my own, and still live my life
on a timescale that is anchored to MST.)

Goddess Bless,
MS