September 24, 2005

• Turducks, all of them.
• Isn't this a little bit like "banning" gravity?
• Gravity is just a theory. What about Intelligent Falling?
• Oh my god. *shakes head* Idiots.
• This reflects badly on the UN. More ammo for those who consider the organization rife with this sort of idiocy.
• If I can just make it to 106,036 A.D., I'll be able to laugh at this dumb policy, if it's adopted. Then afterwards, I'll go back in my time machine and kick their asses.
• Where is there any mention of politicians in this story? Isn't this just an attempt at setting a standard that everyone uses? Leap seconds are very problematic when it comes to gps and telecommunications and such like
• Thanks for the comment, dng! It made me do some research to balance out the knee jerk reaction. And you are correct that politicians aren't mentioned in the story, just in the post header. A little info about the debate both here and here.
• These must be the same idiots who think that governments actually create extra daylight through the imposition of different summer/winter time zones. The proposal to abolish leap seconds was, perhaps predictably, initially proposed by the US government. Insert snarky comment about faith-based physics here.
• Gravity is just a theory. What about Intelligent Falling? I can't fucking breathe now. That's the funniest thing I've heard this week.
• Is there, in fact, any relation at all between the wording of this post and the story it links to? Still, it presented a fine opportunity to mock Those Idiots. You know, the ones who are Really Dumb and certainly Don't Understand Anything. So everything's okay.
• From the article: Some also fear that the daily cycle would drift out of sync with clock time, turning day into night. Day is when the sun is up, and night is when it is down. Time as measured by clocks, atomic or otherwise, has no effect on the Earth's rotation. Hours, minutes, and seconds are arbitrary constructions. How many leap-seconds can you fit on the head of a pin?
• It seems that without the leap seconds, the "out of sync" would be something like one hour in 500 years. Turning night into day would be time consuming indeed! ;)
• But will they worry about this in 500 years? And if they will, shouldn't we do them a favour and keep the leap seconds still?
• yeah, that Bush sure is dumb, wanting to ban seconds! I also heard he wrote a note asking to go to the bathroom!
• Is your point that in 500 years software will easily be able to handle leap seconds so we should simply keep that upper lip stiff for that time? There seem to be good reasons for the elimination. The astronomers and GMT chauvinists are two of the big complainers. The former have a point which is mainly economic while the latter are simply nationalistic Luddites.
• George Bush doesn't care about leap seconds.
• But with the second hurricane, he learned to leap first.
• I don't think that what we're seeing is, as such, as stupid idea. It's motivated by the cost of allowing for 61-second minutes in some types of software. However, that being said, I think that the reality of the universe around us, and the interest of the best possible accuracy in our standards and measurements trumps the economics. We've had leap seconds for thirty years, and, if anyone has software which ABSOLUTELY MUST be second-accurate (or finer), they should just suck it up and accept the fact that the length of a day is not exactly 24 hours long, and that, on occasion, a minute lasts 61 seconds.
• Perhaps we should just scrap the existing time system - it's evidently deeply flawed ;-) Surely if we just re-calibrate everything to be tiny fractions of a millisecond longer then there wouldn't be any need for leap-seconds in the first place.
• eddybennet, the same idea occurrred to me. Unfortunately, the error is not a constant. the cycle of day and night determined by the Earth's rotation, which is slowing by about two milliseconds per day. So you can recalibrate everything today, but tomorrow, there would be another two-millisecond error. What we need are clocks that automatically slow down by two milliseconds a day.
• Aaaah...that was me trying to be all clever and ultimately forgetting that the universe is the greatest mystery. Damn this expanding universe and its ability to continue to baffle us! Incidentally, having seen the quick mention of gravity, I was told by a physics teacher at school once that the laws of gravity don't work properly on Jupiter. Does anyone know if that's true?
• Well, a) by definition, they (the laws of gravity) always work properly, and b) they work the same as everywhere else, again by definition. /snark not intended
• I don't think that what we're seeing is, as such, as stupid idea. It's motivated by the cost of allowing for 61-second minutes in some types of software. Didn't the recently signed Energy Bill contain the 4 week addition to Daylight Saving Time? Ignoring that change will cost way more then ignoring leaps seconds.
• I was told by a physics teacher at school once that the laws of gravity don't work properly on Jupiter. This seems like a bit of an odd statement. It may, however, reffer to one of the problems with the theory of universal gravitation. The "law of gravity" is, in fact, wrong. One famous example of this is the procession of Mercury, which can't be fully accounted for by Newton. Fortunately for us, this is all solved by Einstein's work.