[154464] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: F-ckin Leap Seconds, how do they work?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Owen DeLong)
Wed Jul 4 23:51:33 2012
From: Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAAAwwbVyQBAiXLJ0OsbzUH42SwNDiqas06S3NDrDt6yYgiLHOg@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2012 20:48:58 -0700
To: Jimmy Hess <mysidia@gmail.com>
Cc: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Jul 4, 2012, at 8:39 PM, Jimmy Hess wrote:
> On 7/4/12, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
>
>> 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.
> [snip]
>
> Instead of having leap seconds; redraw the world timezone map, so
> that the boundaries of every time zone are shifted by a distance in
> feet that corresponds to one second; and such that after a thousand
> years and an hour's worth of leap seconds,
> the physical locations of the timezones will have shifted just so
> far, that there is a 1 hour adjustment. :)
>
>
> --
> -JH
Given that we don't seem to be able to eliminate the absurdity of DST,
I doubt that either of those proposals is likely to fly.
Owen
