Today an international group of scientists, diplomats, and timekeepers voted to end the leap second, which has been keeping Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) aligned with the time according to Earth’s rotation (UT1) within one second of difference.
A new system, called the “leap hour,” will allow the Earth’s rotation and official time to fall out of alignment by a full hour
This feels odd, id expect scientists to urge for closer unity with reality - this further distances us from it.
If we just wanted to skip leapseconds, we could have created a different paradigm not based on earths daily rotation, such as epoch time or based on some other observable and more stable instance - instead now well just be talking two orders of magnitude less precisly about our own world because we got frustrated adding leap seconds to account for our already innapropriate paradigm.
They solved this problem with ductape, and with the offbrand stuff that really makes it all look ratty and bad
Earth’s rotation is unpredictable. It gradually slows due to tidal forces, but recently (since around 2020) it’s been speeding up due to climate factors like melting ice at the poles redistributing mass toward the equator. This acceleration means a negative leap second might have been needed soon, a scenario that terrifies computer engineers 😆
Thats what im saying, its a flawed paradigm were currently using.
Theres a daily time that makes sense for terrestial entities, like ourselves, who through our native sensors can easily detect boundries between days and night and highnoon and with tools and techniques more precision from there - but still the paradigm itself of measuring time as subdivisions of days and further years - is profoundly flawed for entities or concepts which are not dependent on earth - such as servers - who care not when the suns up or down or which season it is - purely that one moments happens after the next in sequential measurable order
Leap seconds are iirelavent to humans and a poor lens to perceive time through for servers. But now with this change to leap hours, theoretically times intended for humans tonperceive can be up to minutes off from reality - it means timing a sunset or sunrise or other earthly and solarly moments are now slightly more nuanced to coordinate.
Personally id have prefered all analog clocks to simply be centered on its local high noon - and then all coordinating systems like logistics, transport, servers, and so on to just use epoch time (or some more readable equivalent thats seperate from earthly physical days and years)
Astronomy has gotten way too easy since we accepted elliptical orbits. Let’s kludge it the fuck up again.
Astronomy works great. It’s the world’s software that can’t handle 61 seconds in a minute and keeps crashing every time there’s a correction.
Piece wise Weirstrauss function orbits?
It will make your differential equation based orbit solvers more fun!