[154457] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: F-ckin Leap Seconds, how do they work?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Herrin)
Wed Jul 4 18:11:56 2012
In-Reply-To: <20120704174439.GA2363@panix.com>
From: William Herrin <bill@herrin.us>
Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2012 18:10:45 -0400
To: Brett Frankenberger <rbf+nanog@panix.com>
Cc: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 1:44 PM, Brett Frankenberger <rbf+nanog@panix.com> wrote:
> Without leap seconds, the sun stops being overhead at noon.
But that's ridiculous. The sun *isn't* overhead at noon except at one
particular longitude within each time zone. Everywhere else time synch
to local noon is +/- half an hour.
IMO, leap seconds are a really bad idea. Let the vanishingly few
people who care about a precision match against the solar day keep
track of the deviation from clock time and let everybody else have a
*simple* clock year after year. When the deviation increases to an
hour every what, thousand years? Then you can do a big, well
publicized correction where everybody is paying attention to making it
work instead of being caught by surprise.
Regards,
Bill Herrin
--
William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
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