[LEAPSECS] BBC radio Crowd Science

Steve Allen sla at ucolick.org
Tue Jan 31 14:08:16 EST 2017


On Tue 2017-01-31T13:58:15 -0500, Brooks Harris hath writ:
> Ah, so who's right?

I prefer to think of a leap second as being truly intercalary.
It is saying to atomic clock "It's not tomorrow yet, wait a second."
It is between one calendar day of UTC and the next calendar day of UTC.
It belongs to neither of them.  The tag 2016-12-31T23:59:60 is merely
a way of indicating which two days it is between.
It is unfortunate that nobody thought this stuff through in 1969 when
the decision was made to implement the leap second, and no matter how
it is expressed, encoded, and calculated it will be a special case.

--
Steve Allen                    <sla at ucolick.org>              WGS-84 (GPS)
UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260  Natural Sciences II, Room 165  Lat  +36.99855
1156 High Street               Voice: +1 831 459 3046         Lng -122.06015
Santa Cruz, CA 95064           http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/   Hgt +250 m


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