[LEAPSECS] article for Metrologia

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Steve Allen wrote in
 <20221028045813.GA20487 at ucolick.org>:
 |On Thu 2022-10-27T19:25:01-0700 Steve Allen hath writ:
 |> Levine, Tavella, and Milton have an upcoming article for Metrologia
 |> on the issue of leap seconds in UTC
 |>
 |> https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1681-7575/ac9da5b
 |
 |sorry, stray character appended to my cut and paste
 |
 |https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1681-7575/ac9da5

That "increasing number of applications" all through the document
makes me angry really.  I find it astonishing to read that there
are digital clocks that cannot display a second 60 and all that.
This is just another outcome of the trivialization and
superficialication all around.  You need a reliable source of
time, use TAI; or distribute the offset of UT1 and UTC
permanently, best TAI, too.  so that changes can be detected.  NTP
does still not do it, does it.  (It is still not using DTLS but
something else, too.  My one cent (again).)  You know how large
these packets are?  Now that even refrigerators and light bulbs go
online (and letting aside the privacy issues), it is all there, at
your fingertips.  Sorry, i do not understand.

And _i_ do not want to hear "o-ho-ho, but there is a difference in
between solar time and the time zone anyhow", there is
a difference also in between a priest and a wise man, and you
better conform to the former or they kill you.  Really.
(I would never let temples be driven by engineers, not even if
they are permanently joined by their wifes.)

To me it remains a cultural achievement that we can track the
offset so exactly, and this cultural achievement is practically
shared by a lot of human cultures (if you want to grant these
beasts such, especially the west, goodness, gracious, great balls
of fire!), as many of them have a relation to the sun (the big LED
/ infrared thing on the blue screen, you know).

Distribution of leap seconds into time and date applications is
a problem.  Clock calculations with UNIX epoch are all wrong given
the current semantics except in the current (leap) era.
Does this change if leaps are removed in the future.  For the
past.  We need a reliable clock, which is TAI to me, and we need
the leap second table in order to generate graceful dates in the
past.  Here it is usr/share/zoneinfo/leapseconds, and it expires
2023-06-28 ... UTC.

Just my one cent.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)