Notice they only said leap second.
Meanwhile....
International timekeepers to vote on changing the leap second to a leap hour
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/international-tim... (https://archive.ph/GnQUj https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842329)
really, my I just don't have the time to keep up with this.
We can change that!
A leap hour wouldn't affect you.
In practice it will never affect anyone because it's a legal fiction, but even if you pretend to believe we would actually introduce this "leap hour" it would be in the distant future long after we're all dead and if there are still humans who have any idea the year 2026 happened they're not sure which of Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Tony Stark and John McClane were real people.
Edited to add:
This is such a ridiculously long time frame that they might not be sure whether we were worried about climate change, for them that's either a disaster they survived (and maybe most didn't) or it's a weird blip in their historical charts which they struggle to explain. Did our civilisation do something very, very stupid? There is a flammable gas deep underground, did we set fire to it because we were crazy? Why the hell would we have done that? There are signs we deliberately set fire to the coal which is a toxic rock also found underground? That would explain the global climate going nuts. Maybe it was a ritual or something. Ancient people are mad.
Timekeeping is timeless. We count the number of orbits around the Sun from a specific guy's birthday 2000 years ago, our 12 months are named after rulers of an empire that hasn't existed for almost as long, and weekdays are named after the pagan gods that guy replaced. I don't know why there are 7 days in a week, but supposedly there are 86400 seconds in a day because some Bronze Age people liked the numbers 60 and 12.
Even if one day humans have to account for relativity in their commute, their woes will pale in comparison with those of the poor soul who has to add support for it in a C library that only understands (now, 128-bit) Unix timestamps.
Yeah, nah - that "we" doesn't cover all the other calendars also in use.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day> Even if one day humans have to account for relativity in their commute
You don't think there aren't already application domains that have to account for relativity differences between reference frames?
By "we" I mean ~everybody, as the Gregorian date with year 1 as the (wrongly dated?) birthyear of Jesus Christ is the standard for most domains in international communication.
>You don't think there aren't already application domains that have to account for relativity differences between reference frames?
Of course, GPS for one. My point is about the legacy of it all. Long time after those satellites are down, some future astronomer will be translating timestamps between GPS time and UTC, entirely aware of leap seconds and atomic time and whatnot, just to make sense of 21st century observations.
> the Gregorian date with year 1 as the (wrongly dated?) birthyear of Jesus Christ is the standard for most domains in international communication.
Save for those that care about missing days and months.
As long as cross country events prior to ~1756 aren't being discussed, things get messy and non uniform fast.
Also, there are Gregorian adjacent calendar variants with a Year 0
> some future astronomer will be translating timestamps between GPS time and UTC, entirely aware of leap seconds and atomic time and whatnot, just to make sense of 21st century observations.
A future where the spin of the earth still isn't a uniform metronome - a future with the same issue that exists today (and last century).
> their woes will pale in comparison with those of the poor soul who has to add support
Much of this support has _already_ been added - SKA data networks, for example, have to account for timing issue caused by receivers on one side of planet turning toward a source Vs those on the other side turning away - and reconcile that with past data from the other side of the orbit when the planet was moving toward Vs now when it moves away.
Up until now we have added 1 leap second every 2 year (27 leap seconds since 1972). So if it continues like this, in 7200 years it would be 1 whole hour, and in "only" 3602 years it will be closer to the next hour than the previous (so a natural time to add the leap hour).