[LEAPSECS] Bloomberg announced its smear

Michael Shields mshields at google.com
Tue Sep 27 14:37:20 EDT 2016


On Tue, Sep 27, 2016 at 10:27 AM, Peter Vince <petervince1952 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am interested that Google have chosen to linearly smear over 20 hours,
> thus increasing each second in that period by 13.8888... microseconds -
> surely such an irrational step is difficult to achieve?  Could it be that
> they actually step 125 microseconds every 9 seconds, or maybe 25
> microseconds every 1.8 seconds?

No, there are no steps.

> I'm also curious about the change from cosine to linear smear: the linear
> smear results in a very sharp step change in frequency, exactly what we
> DON'T do, whereas the cosine smear has a very smooth and gentle change,
> surely more easily followed.

That was the motivation for using the cosine curve back in 2008, but
it turns out not to be an issue in practice.


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