US Proposes End of Time as We Know It
The US government has a proposal before the International Telecommunications Union that is just about as insane as anything a government could suggest. If accepted, the day on planet Earth would be declared to be 24 hours exactly. Now, since the moon drags on the Earth a bit, it takes just a little longer for the planet to spin once on its axis, and humanity on occasion adds a bonus second (a “leap second”) to December 31 to re-align the clocks and the universe. The American government doesn’t care – the extra second is hard for computers to handle and so, people are being told to change.
An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal by Keith J. Winstein (not Weinstein) noted, “On Jan. 1, 1996, the addition of a leap second made computers at Associated Press Radio crash and start broadcasting the wrong taped programs. In 1997, the Russian global positioning system, known as Glonass, was broken for 20 hours after a transmission to the country's satellites to add a leap second went awry. And in 2003, a leap-second bug made GPS receivers from Motorola Inc. briefly show customers the time as half past 62 o'clock.” How frightful for the AP, broadcasting the wrong bit of pre-recorded irrelevance. And if Motorola customers’ biggest problem in life is a clock showing "62:30", one is envious. As for Glonass, it was the only thing in Russia during 1997 that got fixed so quickly.
Yes, it would be more convenient to divorce time measurement (which is thoroughly artificial by the way) from the motion of the Earth (which will continue to slow over time due to gravity). But for astronomers, whose instruments must compensate for the rotation of the planet to do their work, the change would cost anywhere from $10,000 for a rather insignificant facility to $500,000 for some of the larger installations.
Proponents of this stupidity claim that there are safety issues at hand. Air traffic control systems are vulnerable to such unfortunate time-keeping issues. Surely getting rid of the leap second would fix that? Not according to Mr. Winstein’s article. “‘If your navigation system causes two planes to crash because of a one-second error, you have worse problems than leap seconds,’ said Steve Allen, a University of California astronomer who maintains a Web site about leap seconds.”
Of course, the Americans do recognize that there is difficulty with their proposal – given enough centuries, the difference between the Earth’s rotation and the clocks will have noon occurring in the middle of the night. No matter, they say, let mankind have a “leap hour” every half millennium or so. The urge to call the proposal “foolish, ill-considered and plain moronic” and its supporters “jackasses” is overwhelming. Pope Gregory is looking down from heaven and shaking his head sadly.
As an alternative, how about some computer science grad student writing a quick program that will allow those who need to adjust their computer clocks to do so. Give the kid a PhD, fix the computers, and leave the rest of the human race out of it. Or is that too convenient?
© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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