[LEAPSECS] pick your own length of second

[Dennis Ferguson]

On 12 Jan, 2012, at 05:33 , Tom Van Baak wrote:

> Here's a plot that shows how a non leap second UTC would

> look if the cesium resonance were other than 9,192,631,770.

> 

> http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/ut/ut-ani-v2.gif

> 

> In retrospect it's too bad |DUT1| had to be so tight. If Essen

> and friends had made it 10 s we wouldn't need leap seconds

> in a lifetime.


I'm not sure that would be better, though, since I think the
problem that makes leap seconds hard is their rarity.  You
can write and test code to handle leap seconds now, but you
might have to wait three or four years to see how that works
out in real life.

If we had a leap second every other week we'd have gotten so
much real life practice that depending on the code and procedures
to handle the leap wouldn't seem so scary.  Frequent leaps
probably wouldn't help the "let's disseminate a timescale that
precision time services will actually use" problem, but might
help a lot with the "leap seconds break my system's software"
problem.

Dennis Ferguson