F-ckin Leap Seconds, how do they work?

Wed Jul 4 22:10:45 UTC 2012

On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 1:44 PM, Brett Frankenberger <rbf+nanog at 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 at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
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