Looking Before We Leap

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The wait of the world

Mainly about leap seconds.

On the split-second level, ‘leap’ mediates between the precision of atomic time and the position of our Sun in the sky. It is worth noting that while a leap year is a year with an extra day (Leap Day — February 29, when turnabout is fair play), a leap second lasts no longer than any other second. Applied to a minute, a positive leap second creates a 61-second interval that is not called a leap minute. (Nor would the 59-second outcome of a negative leap, should one ever be required, be called a leap minute.)

A leap minute, rather, is a hypothetical way of putting off till tomorrow what leap seconds do today. If instituted, it would allow the powers responsible for time measurement and distribution to defer insertion till the leap-second debt reached 60, and trust some future authority to intercalate them all at once. But a leap minute would likely add up to a much bigger headache than the sum of its 60 leap seconds.

I’m not sure if the US has established an official position on the matter. I know there have been discussions about the pros and cons, both within the US and with international attendance, such as the conference mentioned in the article.

Perhaps even more of an affront to British pride than the misplaced meridian is the fact that Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is no longer the world standard. GMT fell out of official favour in the 1920s, for semantic reasons.

It may be worth mentioning again that in the US, GMT was used as the official, legal reference for determining the time and time zones until the 2007 America Competes Act, where it was finally changed to UTC (the change is spelled out in sec. 3570).

I wouldn’t mind additional leap second insertions. But then, I don’t programme computers, or control air traffic, or perform any of the myriad time-sensitive activities that would make me a stakeholder in the leap-second debate. I am merely a person who still wears a wristwatch, owns a sundial, and takes an abiding interest in all aspects of finding, keeping, and telling time.

From what I have heard and observed first-hand, it’s a pain to do this, and we’re just lucky that things haven’t gone wrong from the many potential problems inherent to the issue. My own view is that counting on being lucky is a terrible standard operating procedure.

5 thoughts on “Looking Before We Leap”

  1. Federal administration will certify local companies resetting master sundials at government and private sites as the sun lags time. Giant ion engine space boosters mounted tangent to the geoid will spin up the Earth as necessary (zero carbon emissions). All watches will be annually timed, and those that run slow destroyed.

    During a weekly UN Time Moment, all Earth’s people run due west for five minutes, keeping the Earth on track. Freeway lanes pointing only westward must be emergency constructed. Trains going west will be air-shuttled east to save time.

    We can win the War on Time! Legislate conservation laws to make it possible. Stockpile time in national temporal reserves. Act now, through tremendous irrecoverable waste and expense, to prevent empty clocks in the year 45,1583. Strength through Sacrifice, and in a timely manner.

  2. First hand knowledge from writing software that needs leap second corrections: Leap seconds are extremely annoying.

    I’m not sure that a leap minute would add up to more headache than the sum of 60 leap seconds. In fact, I’d argue the opposite. A leap minute correction is exactly as hard as *one* leap second, but you only have to do it 1/60th as frequently(at most, because leap seconds are not necessarily in the same direction)

    The problem is that leap seconds are not at regular intervals. The direction and timing of leap seconds is decided by a committee. Some years you might have 2 leap seconds, some years you might have 0, and they can be 1 or -1, so any clock that needs to keep consistent timing needs to download a table of leap seconds annually or have the table installed manually, or employ a human to jump the clock by hand at the correct time.

    It is a boneheadedly complex system that adds very little value. Few applications care if they’re off by a few seconds from our astronomical rotational reference, but those same applications care very much if we’re off by a second from other clocks on earth.

  3. One problem with a leap minute is it will become an even more rare even initially, and people will forget how to implement it. New systems will be even less apt to be able to accommodate it.

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