[LEAPSECS] BBC radio Crowd Science

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 12:08 PM, Steve Allen <sla at ucolick.org> wrote:
> 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.

Philosophically you may be right.

Mathematically, however, I don't think that makes much sense. :60 is
an irregular radix. It's clearly added to the prior day, just like Feb
29th is part of February. Also, doing the long-hand math on the
irregular radix, it also makes sense to have it be part of the prior
day and to increment the offset at the start of the leap second.

Warner