[LEAPSECS] The leap second, deep space and how we keep time -Brooks

[Matsakis, Demetrios]

To Steve mostly,

It would be misleading to reference the comment in Wall Street Journal article, because people might conclude that staff at the USNO disagree among themselves.   This is not the case, at least this time.   Ed Powers, who is right now heading to the airport, was interviewed because he is a recognized authority on GPS.  As the articles notes, his big point was the unpredictability over very long periods.  He was not attempting to make a new prediction or trying to choose among them.  

As I have previously suggested, it would be refreshing if your web pages indicated that it has been recently claimed that the data since 2000 support a prediction that UTC-UT1 would be less than 1 minute by 2100 - and, more importantly, why.  You can quote me if you like.  Although I do not consider myself an expert on Earth rotation, I did work in that field in the 17 years before I switched to timekeeping.  I also ran my prediction past people that I do consider to be experts.   One of those was the person who generated often-quoted 20th century predictions, for example. 

Although I sent my reasoning to you off-line a while back, I'd be happy to telephone you about the reasoning if you send me a time that is convenient for you.  I have provided the essence to this listserve already, though.

Demetrios

-----Original Message-----
From: LEAPSECS [mailto:leapsecs-bounces at leapsecond.com] On Behalf Of Warner Losh
Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2015 11:56 AM
To: Leap Second Discussion List
Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] The leap second, deep space and how we keep time -Brooks


> On Jan 28, 2015, at 2:33 AM, Martin Burnicki <martin.burnicki at meinberg.de> wrote:
> 
> Warner Losh schrieb:
>> 
>>> On Jan 27, 2015, at 7:18 PM, Steve Allen <sla at ucolick.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Tue 2015-01-27T21:41:17 +0000, Matsakis, Demetrios hath writ:
>>>> Equally unfortunate is that 30 servers in the NTP pool inserted a 
>>>> leap second last Dec 31.
>>> 
>>> There is no action that the ITU-R can take which will change this 
>>> kind of misbehavior in these already-deployed systems.
>>> 
>>> Therefore this is irrelevant to the activities which will happen at 
>>> ITU-R WRC-15, and I don't think that misdirecting attention will 
>>> help the ITU-R decide what to do.
>> 
>> One of the arguments against leap seconds  are that they are hard to get right.
>> How many machines inserted an April 31st by mistake? Has an error 
>> like that ever happened? No. Or more likely, has anybody thought it 
>> was Feb 29th in a non-leap year? No. There have been some 
>> applications that mistakenly though Y2K wasn’t a leap year. And there were some issues with the Zune music player.
>> And there was that unfortunate Feb 30th incident, but that was in a 
>> transition to Gregorian… :)
>> 
>> By comparison, the list of mistaken leap second issues is legion… 
>> Isn’t that relevant to the practicability of any standard under 
>> discussion? Or am I missing your point?
> 
> So similarly, if there are faulty DNS or DHCP servers around, should 
> these services be abolished instead of fixing the source of the 
> problem? ;-)

I think you’re making a false equivalency argument here. While DNS and DHCP can go awry, the frequency is quite a bit lower than bogus leap second announcements. There’s no single, systemic failure with DHCP or DNS like there is with a mistaken notion of leap seconds.

Fixing the source of the problem, leap seconds existing, though does sound like an excellent idea :)

Warner
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