F-ckin Leap Seconds, how do they work?

Wed Jul 4 22:29:27 UTC 2012

On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 06:10:45PM -0400, William Herrin wrote:
> 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.
> 

Yeah but what you don't understand is that manual navigation after a
certain point of difference becomes inaccurate to a degree that is
unacceptable by most military standards.

100 or a 1000 years the difference is too big. Someone somewhere at some
point evaluated this need in the range of "0.3 - 0.9? in order for
nauticle and other means of direction to not be impacted.

It would be easy to disagree and say "Well! we have GPS and other such
digital devices to tell where you are now!"... and if those go out just
like all these failing Java Apps ?. I would not want to be the guy that
would have to calculate all possible differences just to attempt to get
a accurate location and then find out the math was wrong and you are 100
miles off target. Just sayin!

-- 

 - (2^(N-1))