On 6 Jul 2022 at 15:38, Billy Croan wrote:
> I'd love to know, if there was some physics student on this list, how
> much energy would it consume to physically alter the earth's rotation
> instead of using leap seconds. Yeah, moving the world sounds like a
> de-facto 'can't be done' scenario.
On 17 Jan 2019 at 15:57, Brooks Harris wrote:
> In private discussion with one member of that committee on that topic
> it was said "... but the time people would just not stop arguing!".
> Funny how everybody knows what time is but can't agree on what time
> is.
The music group Chicago
A lot of Americans synchronize their new year celebrations to the
drop of the ball in Times Square as seen on TV, which means they
celebrate a few seconds late because digital TV has an inherent delay
to it (for signal encoding or something... I really don't know the
technical details).
On 16 Aug 2018 at 0:18, Sanjeev Gupta wrote:
> Maybe time travel is hard because you need to set the dial using UT2,
> but the UTC-UT2 difference is known only in the future of the traveler
> wanting to back?
This was, weirdly enough, a plot point in the comic book story of
"Superman's Girl
On 6 Jan 2017 at 22:44, Hal Murray wrote:
> I think there are two different types of wait. One is the simple wait N
> seconds. The other is wait until a specified date-time, say a month from
> now. They really are different so I don't see how to make your "one
> interface" work.
It seems
On 1 Jan 2017 at 14:27, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
> Steve Summit said:
> > But on the wire it was:
> >
> > Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2016 18:59:60 -0500
>
> That's what mutt showed me (I'm running sendmail on my
> own FreeBSD box).
That's also what Pegasus Mail for Windows shows.
--
== Dan ==
On 31 May 2015 at 19:33, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
Most likely, at some random time after the leapsecond, your clock
steps a second.
...which is basically how most computers deal with time
synchronization, excepting the minority that actually attempt
continuous high precision and accuracy;
On 18 Jan 2014 at 19:51, Warner Losh wrote:
Of course, the 6 month window does make it impossible to compute a time_t for
a known
interval into the future that's longer than 6 months away...
What are the applications that actually need to schedule events more
than 6 months in the future
On 14 Jan 2014 at 23:29, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
It follows rather trivially from the fact that there were no
year zero, that the first century must contain the years [1...100] in
order to be a century.
And how many seconds must those years contain?
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== Dan ==
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On 15 Jan 2014 at 12:58, Richard Clark wrote:
When you enter a building on ground level and you go to a room on the
1st floor do you expect to use the stairs or elevator? The answer depends
on wheather you are in Europe or the US (or on the campus of the University
of Arizona).
One building
Now, do those things do leap seconds too?
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/11/03/the-witching-hour/
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On 15 Aug 2012 at 7:52, Steve Allen wrote:
The next meeting of ITU-R WP7A will be in Manta Ecuador in September.
The US WP7A has submitted a draft statement for review by US citizens.
https://www.ussg7.org/ITAC-R%20Documents.aspx
The deadline for comments is September 5.
Yuck, all the
On 9 Jul 2012 at 14:31, Warner Losh wrote:
First, the current right database can't be updated in place:
you have to restart.
M$ Windows people are used to constantly having to restart their
systems at the most trivial updates... *Nix folks are spoiled!
--
== Dan ==
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On 10 Jul 2012 at 8:38, Warner Losh wrote:
You really don't understand the depth of the leap second issue in
software. If it were that easy, it would have actually been
solved. People just don't care, and that's the problem.
Actually, from what I've seen and heard about this year's crop of
On 24 Feb 2012 at 11:59, Steve Allen wrote:
On Fri 2012-02-24T19:52:19 +, Ian Batten hath writ:
Steve's original claim was about acts of parliament.
Prior to the detailed tables there is section 2
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/apgb/Geo2/24/23/section/2
which says bissextile (or, as in
On 11 Feb 2012 at 14:26, Paul J. Ste. Marie wrote:
On 1/26/2012 4:42 PM, Hal Murray wrote:
There are also months, but they are sufficiently non-uniform that nobody
expects simple arithmetic conversions to work.
Care to place money on that? A lot of financial stuff assumes a 360 day
On 25 Jan 2012 at 12:05, Rob Seaman wrote:
I don't recall saying any such thing. The original reply was to
this comment from Daniel R. Tobias:
Usually such events are only fixed relative to local civil
time in the place where the event is to take place...
I was pointing out
On 22 Jan 2012 at 0:09, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
You can create any UTC timestamp you want at any point in history
where it is defined.
But you can only convert that UTC timestamp to a realtime_t (and
vice-versa) for timestamps where the conversion is defined.
Then I suppose it wouldn't
Wonder if this will describe the ultimate outcome of the
implementation of this proposed timekeeping functionality:
http://xkcd.com/927/
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== Dan ==
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On 23 Jan 2012 at 7:24, Steve Allen wrote:
The same is true for most future events in any time scale.
The most evident example is the countdown for a launch.
Or the time left in a football or basketball game; it ticks downward
in (presumably SI) seconds, but the clock starts and stops at
On 20 Jan 2012 at 17:26, Mark Calabretta wrote:
If UTC is discontinuous in any sense then so must the Gregorian
calendar be, with a discontinuity 86400 times greater on Feb/29.
You don't even have to wait for a leap year for a non-uniform radix,
since you've already got that in 30 days hath
On 18 Jan 2012 at 7:41, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
I am pretty sure that at this point everybody read GMT as UTC in
those treaties, if they have not already been fixed.
So, basically:
Using a different name from UTC for a future time standard that is
unmoored from solar time is too problematic
On Thu, January 19, 2012 9:03 am, Tony Finch wrote:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16625614
I knew it... it's enough of a hot button issue among the handful of
people who care about it that nobody wants to commit to actually taking
any action, so it will just keep bouncing around
On 17 Jan 2012 at 23:18, Warner Losh wrote:
But it just so happens that this draft changes UTC to match the
POSIX definition of time_t where leap seconds don't really exist...
It seems to be a rather blatant example of geek arrogance to say
that, when a tech standard fails to conform to
On 17 Jan 2012 at 10:12, Ian Batten wrote:
Which is a deal breaker, because whatever a country adopts as civil
time, that's going to be the primary payload on its national
broadcast standards
And what if some countries use a solar-time-based standard and some
an atomic-time-based one (as is
On 17 Jan 2012 at 20:59, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
A lot of technical treaties and regulations say UTC in no uncertain words,
for instance in air-space regulations. I am pretty certain that creating
a new timescale and mandating its transmission over for instance WWV[B] and
DCF77 would give
I note that in this picture:
http://bijijoo.com/2011/still-life-with-rick-santorum-lube-dildo-and-justin-bieber-doll
a painting entitled Still Life with Rick Santorum, Lube, Dildo, and
Justin Bieber Doll, the digital clock reads 6:66. This would
require a system including more than six leap
On 12 Jan 2012 at 12:15, Tony Finch wrote:
You may know that it's common to photograph analoge clocks with their arms
set to a position that makes them look cheerful, roughly 01:50 or 10:10.
In the illustration in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass,
and What Alice Found There, the side
On 9 Jan 2012 at 15:55, Ian Batten wrote:
And that in the end, society at large's response may well be a
great big meh, in that removing leap seconds solves problems for
99% of the population, while the remaining 1% need to just sort out
their own house. Sorry.
My guess is that about 99%
On 9 Jan 2012 at 21:08, Michael Sokolov wrote:
The most recent code change I've made in connection with Y2K was just
a few months ago in 2011-07: I have finally changed SCCS to use
4-digit years instead of just the last two digits.
I can recall, as early as 1981, making a point of using
On 8 Jan 2012 at 17:10, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
I have taken the liberty of alerting Hanne to the fact that you may
try to harness her to a political wagon and that it might be prudent
for her to consult other subject matter specialists before committing
anything to writing based on your
On 4 Jan 2012 at 20:15, Michael Sokolov wrote:
The problem with your argument is that the time zone system doesn't
work for everyone. What is the local civil time for someone who
doesn't hold citizenship in any country and lives on a boat that
continuously circumnavigates the world?
World
On 28 Dec 2011 at 13:46, Paul J. Ste. Marie wrote:
Naw, just get a papal bull and wait a few centuries for the holdouts to
change over. Russia held out until 1917 if memory serves.
Oh, there's plenty of bull involved in that proposal, but I don't
think it's papal.
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail
On 23 Nov 2011 at 18:14, Rob Seaman wrote:
The Long Now 10,000-Year Clock is on the cover of Time magazine this week:
http://blog.longnow.org/2011/11/22/time/
The American version and/or the foreign ones? Time has been under
some criticism lately for putting covers on weightier
On 17 Nov 2011 at 11:20, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
But the really interesting thing to remember here, is that if you
asked the railroads about leap seconds, what are the chances you
would get somebody on the other end of the line, who knew that the
MVB standards would have to be revised, and
On 7 Oct 2011 at 7:53, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
In message 20111007013716.ga15...@ucolick.org, Steve Allen writes:
On a much more useful note, Daniel Gambis pointed to the survey results
http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/questionnaire/result.php
I am surprised at the 75% for status quo.
I'm
I watched the premiere episode of Terra Nova, a new science fiction
TV series, last week. The premise is that people are escaping a
dystopian future (of the overpopulated, overpolluted, repressive sort
standard in sci-fi movies at least as far back as Soylent Green) by
going through a
On 21 Sep 2011 at 7:53, Ian Batten wrote:
hunting sunrise, hunting sunset, hunting daylight and hunting
night all return zero hits.
I don't really think that the presence or absence of enforced
penalties for failing to precisely adhere to sunrise/sunset-based
restrictions makes any
On 20 Sep 2011 at 12:09, Ian Batten wrote:
You wouldn't be leaping UTC, you'd be leaping civil time. We're
used to that.
Though we're not used to any local civil times being over 24 hours
removed from UTC, which would happen eventually after a few millennia
of UTC being uncoupled from
On 16 Sep 2011 at 10:54, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
Well, Googles hack is a workaround for internal use with no regard
to subsecond interoperability with anybody else.
That's typical of Google's general philosophy, where they value their
services functioning smoothly over strict compliance with
On 18 Aug 2011 at 10:30, mike cook wrote:
Could this be a good argument for getting parking ticket offences thrown
out?
Maybe if the fraction of a second that separates UTC from true GMT
(if that's even defined any more) actually happens to make the
difference between something being an
On 13 Jun 2011 at 23:00, Zefram wrote:
Recently there's been some fuss about defining a similar time unit
for use in other sciences, and the IUPAC (chemists) and IUGS
(geologists) have jointly defined a unit called annus defined as
31556925.445 s.
That seems a little too close to anus... it
On 2 Jun 2011 at 6:12, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
http://cdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/html/leapseconds_requirements.html
In particular section 3.3
That document has bogosity from its very first sentence where it says
Current CDF_Epoch time scheme is nominally continuous Gregorian time
from 0AD...
On 25 May 2011 at 4:59, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
In message 68e04164-495f-40cf-b287-ca9a58780...@noao.edu, Rob Seaman writes:
By definition, of course, the length of a day is always 86,400
seconds, or 24 hours of 60 minutes of 60 natural seconds :-)
For values of always starting slowly
On 13 Apr 2011 at 13:47, Ask Bjørn Hansen wrote:
For human perception this minute difference will be completely
lost in the noise compared to the seasonal changes.
In the current system, for the vast majority of users, leap seconds
are completely lost in the noise compared to the regular
On 11 Apr 2011 at 13:06, Tom Van Baak wrote:
1) In my experience URL's change from time to time (note the U in
URI means Uniform, not Universal).
There's a famous essay by Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide
Web, entitled Cool URIs Don't Change:
On 10 Apr 2011 at 22:08, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
UTC *is* the timescale that has been legislated already.
In some places. Others stick with Greenwich Mean Time or something
else based on solar time at some meridian, while some don't even seem
to be sure of what they're basing their time
http://yhoo.it/e89swl
So I guess they won't need as many leap seconds in the near future?
--
== Dan ==
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___
On 6 Mar 2011 at 22:47, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
The civil day starts and stops whenever the most powerful civil
authorities for a given locality decide it should do so.
Perhaps at sundown, if the most powerful authority happens to be a
rabbi?
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site:
Recently my mom was visiting me in Florida from New York, and when I
was taking her to the airport, she noticed the time was about 4:45
PM, and that it was broad daylight outside, and remarked that at this
time in New York it would be dark already. This is an example of how
people do make
On 2 Feb 2011 at 22:09, Steve Allen wrote:
This is not an argument about mean but about meaning.
So don't get mean about it! :-)
That depends on what the meaning of mean means! (Positively
Clintonian!)
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips:
On 2 Feb 2011 at 8:32, Gerard Ashton wrote:
- the SI second is part of a coherent system of units and redefinition
of the second would
disturb the definition of most other units
You could have multiple types of seconds, like you have troy and
avoirdupois ounces, and U.S. and imperial
On 1 Feb 2011 at 10:31, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
Today, there is no leap second data, but zoneinfo data requires
running a script at the low JDK level and a JVM reboot. This is a
tricky system level operation that operators dislike.
Well, Windows users, for one, are very much used to being
Why is it that humankind has the irresistable impulse to make things
more complex and abstract until hardly anybody can understand them?
Things usually start out so simple a 5-year-old can understand them,
then progress to the point that it takes an advanced degree in a
specialized subject to
On 1 Feb 2011 at 13:23, Steve Allen wrote:
This is the problem which corporations solve by trademarks which allow
them ownership of words and ability to protect and change their
meaning.
Unless the trademark falls victim to genericide, where enough
people use it as a generic word that a
On 31 Jan 2011 at 15:59, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
In message 12988684-b911-481b-b557-90e55cd73...@noao.edu, Rob Seaman writes:
On Jan 31, 2011, at 1:07 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
Is there really a requirement to render the concept of universal
time meaningless? Or is UTC merely
On 30 Jan 2011 at 11:57, Warner Losh wrote:
On 01/29/2011 09:56, Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
On 28 Jan 2011 at 23:59, Warner Losh wrote:
Just for the record. I have no minions, armed or otherwise.
Do you have a minyan (defined as ten Jewish males, needed to begin
prayer in Orthodox Jewish
On 28 Jan 2011 at 23:59, Warner Losh wrote:
Just for the record. I have no minions, armed or otherwise.
Do you have a minyan (defined as ten Jewish males, needed to begin
prayer in Orthodox Jewish tradition)?
--
== Dan ==
Dan's Mail Format Site: http://mailformat.dan.info/
Dan's Web Tips:
On 29 Jan 2011 at 2:02, Michael Sokolov wrote:
I choose to live my life on a rubber timescale similar to UTC-SLS,
and I am prepared to use deadly firepower to defend my right to
live my life on this timescale. If PHK or Warner Losh or their
armed minions (aka local sheriffs enforcing laws
On 1 Jan 2011 at 10:37, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
In message 4d1eb623.2720.37213...@dan.tobias.name, Daniel R. Tobias
writes:
I just watched the ball drop in Times Square (on TV, not in person!),
and noticed that my watch (auto-synced daily via radio signal) was
about 15 seconds fast
On 30 Dec 2010 at 22:15, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
Outside the usual suspects on the LEAPSECS list I have a hard time
finding anybody who will defend leap seconds.
How many people do you find who oppose them? I imagine the easiest
sorts of people to find are those who don't know and don't
On 26 Dec 2010 at 21:35, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
In message 4d17a98a.7090...@yahoo.com, Michael Deckers writes:
The astronomical phenomenon that is used for determining
the phase of UTC is the rotation of the Earth, and this
is no longer one of the fundamental vehicles for
On 25 Dec 2010 at 20:03, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
1. There is no international civil timekeeping, civil timekeeping
is a national legislative matter.
2. Nobody but the respective legal entities can decide what it should
be tied to.
So what that means is, even if you get the
On 11 Dec 2010 at 0:40, Paul Sheer wrote:
At the ISP I consult for there are about 20 servers serving 60,000
customers. Their clocks routinely go out of sync and it doesn't affect
service.
I have a script that dumps the timestamps of each of a number of
servers where I work; this is a recent
On 4 Nov 2010 at 11:59, Rob Seaman wrote:
Note that civil timestamps and rates will be wrong the entire
time, not just at the end of time.
So should they adjust all of them retroactively, editing all of
history to make the times of events (e.g., the times the planes hit
the buildings on
On 24 Oct 2010 at 18:12, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
Medicine production is another case: In continuous production
setups, all materials have to be traceable to with second granualirity
Why is the precise second something was manufactured or shipped so
urgent? As a consumer, the only
On 23 Oct 2010 at 5:21, Finkleman, Dave wrote:
Now, shout back.
You still haven't learned how to reply to the list without
backquoting an entire digest, I see, although one would think that
the silliness of this style would become quickly apparent once you
received the next digest which
On 23 Sep 2010 at 12:35, Steve Allen wrote:
On Thu 2010-09-23T11:59:33 -0700, Robert Seaman hath writ:
What precisely is the status of GPS for actual purposes of navigation?
You are in a twisty little maze of bureaucratic regulations, all alike.
You get what you pay for in GPS. There
On 2 Sep 2010 at 7:56, Ian Batten wrote:
I'm slightly surprised that no-one has suggested adopting the Indian
solution (UTC+4h30m), which is ideal for political areas that are
about 30 degrees east to west, and switching the EU to UTC+30m (plus,
or not, daylight saving in both cases).
On 2 Sep 2010 at 9:58, M. Warner Losh wrote:
If it is getting light or dark too early or late, people will just
change the time zones. This is a very common occurrence, and one
that will happen naturally before it is midnight with the sun over
head.
So you'd like to end up with an even
On 2 Sep 2010 at 12:49, M. Warner Losh wrote:
I'd wager that UTC, whatever its realization, would likely trump any
locally written laws. After all, UTC has been a widely accepted
approximation of the local laws that's attained the force of law
through repetitive use
They can get away with
On 1 Sep 2010 at 20:02, Tony Finch wrote:
On Fri, 27 Aug 2010, Ian Batten wrote:
Although unrelated, it would also open up the whole moving the UK to WET
can
of worms, which has become distinctly toxic because of the implications for
Scotland.
The UK is currently on WET (same as
Just saw this article:
http://www.cbs12.com/articles/earth-4724481-chile-axis.html
What effect is this going to have on leap seconds in the near future?
I would expect that, since the leap seconds are required due to the
lengthening of the day, shortening it now would either reduce the
On 17 Feb 2009 at 14:27, Rob Seaman wrote:
Creating an ID that is guaranteed unique is not a trivial task,
especially if (as one suspects is true here) a central server is out
of the question.
If the ID includes as one of its elements a fully qualified domain
name, and the owner/operator
On 6 Jan 2009 at 10:12, Tony Finch wrote:
Note that there's no need for global co-ordination. Each country (or
county) can change when it is convenient for them. The effect would
probably be a shifting of timezone boundaries in lumps and bumps that
averages out to the overall DUT1 drift.
Here's an article about a leap-year bug fairly similar to the one in
current Zume music players which immobilized Wang computers in 1984:
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-The-Bug-That-Shut-Down-
Computers-WorldWide.aspx
Also, the comments section of that article includes the actual
On 1 Jan 2009 at 20:47, Rob Seaman wrote:
So the point of that preface is that the meaning of the word mean
depends on the purpose of the exercise.
What does mean mean? Don't be mean about it! :-)
--
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On 31 Dec 2008 at 8:08, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
Notice the near: the 0° meridian no longe passes through the
transit instrument there.
They moved it? (The meridian, or the transit instrument?)
Given continental drift, there really aren't any fixed objects on
Earth anyway... just what is
It just reached midnight here in the U.S. Eastern time zone... the
time counting toward midnight on ABC's New Years Rockin' Eve didn't
show a leap second (I think somebody earlier on this list claimed
those shows went 58-59-LEAP-00, but this one didn't), and of course
was correct here since
On 30 Dec 2008 at 8:57, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
We have millions of documents which mandate, directly or indirectly,
the usage of UTC. Starting with legislation about local timezones
over POSIX to international treaties about transport, communication
and power-generation.
And plenty more
On 30 Dec 2008 at 12:36, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
The most important document in this respect is POSIX btw.
That's a kind of geek-centrism on your part to elevate a computer
technical standard over all the millennia of legislation and cultural
practices regarding timekeeping... I'm pretty
On 31 Dec 2008 at 0:12, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
Page XVII, the glossary has an entry
GMT Greenwich Mean Time
But it has no entry for UTC, UT1 any other UT (or leap seconds).
So the solution is to cause the civil-time standard to have no
resemblance to actual GMT, so that
On 23 Dec 2008 at 8:43, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
The rest of us have no trouble with a tolerance of up to (at least)
one hour, because that's what is already the reality for 99.9..%
of the population.
And then your distant descendants will throw a huge fit about the
possibility of a leap
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