[LEAPSECS] BBC radio Crowd Science

Steve Summit scs+ls at eskimo.com
Wed Feb 1 07:39:19 EST 2017


Brooks Harris wrote:
> On 2017-01-31 08:21 PM, Steve Summit wrote:
> > I feel like I should apologize for my earlier contribution to it,
> > which presented a nice-looking, persuasive-sounding argument
> > which now looks an awful lot like it's... wrong.
>
> Not at all. Its an informed contribution. And I think it's not "wrong". 
> At least not yet. I think its "right", so far.  :-)

On further reflection, I think we're all right.  For every
let's-look-at-the-arithmetic argument that suggests we should
use the "new" offset during the leap second, I can come up with
one which suggests the opposite.  (Basically it depends on
whether you come at the leap second "from below" or "from above".
I'll send the longwinded details in a separate message, if anyone
actually cares.)  So I'm right, and you're right, and Warner's
right, and Steve Allen is especially right in his assertion that
it's just inherently, fundamentally ambiguous.

> > My own errors were,
>
> Standby. Not errors yet :-)

Well, see, when I subtracted 23:59:60 from 00:00:35 and got 35,
(that was for 2015-06-30T23:59:60), I was using an imperfectly
leapsecond-aware tool tool that normalized 23:59:60 to 00:00:00,
so I got a misleading answer.


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