[LEAPSECS] happy anniversary pips

[Warner Losh]

On Feb 10, 2014, at 5:49 PM, Greg Hennessy wrote:


> On 02/10/2014 11:57 AM, Warner Losh wrote:

> 

>> I get that people don't like this, and that there's some resistance

>> to it on aesthetic grounds dressed up in the guise of technical

>> arguments about universal not meaning what it has always meant, and

>> that entrenched interests aren't unhappy enough with the status quo

>> to risk changes...

> 

> 

> So the horrors of having a variable number of seconds in a minute is so

> bad we'll switch to having a variable number of hours in day.


We have that today. This changes nothing in that regard. In Atomic Time, there's always 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 seconds. In Civil Time, it is whatever the authorities want. Changing DST has been done several times in my short lifetime, and the hour shift is well understood...


> I suspect the major advantage of the new scheme is that

> it pushes the matter off till most people around are

> dead.


Perhaps, but leap seconds are a solution to the problem that must die in the fullness of time. With the quadratic acceleration there will come a time in a few thousand years when one leap second a month or day isn't enough and another solution will be necessary to keep things in sync. So in a way, leap seconds are putting a band-aide over the problem until everybody alive today is dead too...

Warner