F-ckin Leap Seconds, how do they work?

Thu Jul 5 03:48:58 UTC 2012

On Jul 4, 2012, at 8:39 PM, Jimmy Hess wrote:

> On 7/4/12, William Herrin <bill at 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