Time travel

What does it take to bring big tech to its knees? A leap second.

I remember on one of my submarine patrols performing a ‘leap second’ adjustment for our time-frequency standard.
It’s shockingly simple.
Wait until midnight and then add another second.
A leap second is an adjustment that is ‘once-in-a-while’ applied to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to keep it close to the mean solar time. The concept is similar to that of leap day, but instead of adding a 29th day to February to keep the calendar synchronized with Earth's orbit around the Sun, an extra second 23:59:60 is added to the last day of June or December to keep the time of the day synchronized with the Earth's rotation relative to the Sun. The mean solar day is about 2 milliseconds longer than 24 hours and in long term it's getting longer as the Moon is constantly slowing down the Earth's rotation.
Of course, like sunspot cycles this has NOTHING to do with our climate, but hey…..
‘Science’

Unfortunately for the intrepid underwater mariners of the world, the method for inserting the additional second and the 1980’s tech that we used at the time to insert it left an amazing amount of doubt as to whether we performed the procedure correctly.

SO….
We had to verify my adjustment by going to PD and verifying not just MY adjustment but those of my beloved nation’s navigation satellites, WWV, SSIXS, etc were all in agreement.
If you’ve ever traveled across the international date line, and had to file a travel claim afterwards, you understand how quickly simple things can get pooched.

 

Seems like the importance of those two effects on climate could be measured and compared to that of other known drivers ... and maybe even has been. But hey, thanks for the clever slipping of that talking point into a post ostensibly about something else.

 

"Tech companies hate the practice because it can wreak havoc on precise technological systems that are much better at telling time than humans are — at least until we insert an extra second. Past additions of leap seconds have caused parts of the internet to go down for hours."

These tech companies hate it because they are too lazy to do timekeeping right, and too cheap to fix their existing design errors. Instead of properly fixing those design blunders, they just want to save money by pushing the solution off onto someone else, saving money in their own pockets.

The official atomic time scale, TAI, and several other related time scales, have no leap seconds. They are continuous. Discontinuous leap seconds appear only when TAI is translated to the civil scale, UTC, Coordinated Universal Time, which is kept quasi-synchronous with Earth's rotation for very good reason.

GPS and mobile phone system timescales are also continuous, and readily available to those who really need such a scale. They don't crash when leap seconds occur. These tech companies just need to man up, and pay the money and labor to convert to a proper timekeeping system.

Dumping leap seconds from UTC is analogous to dumping the Gregorian calendar and returning to the Julian calendar, with an offset this time around so that it won't match the original Julian calendar. Or to abolishing February 29th altogether, because leap days are just too hard.


PS. Somehow it had escaped my notice until now that Android system time is not UTC. Apparently it doesn't do leap seconds, thus has drifted ahead of UTC. The first web page I saw claimed that is it 15 seconds ahead of UTC, but mine is showing as just 8 seconds fast. Apparently iPhones don't have this problem.

 

Turns out Heisenberg in both forms showed up last night along with a reference to Time Travel, Quantum Mechanics and HG Wells.

 

I'd check the "time" that the article was written.
My droids must use network time because it's in synch with my apples.
I kept my 2 newest Droids (Samsung 8-ish and an LG) after we switched and I still tinker with them, for IOT tinkering and other things.

Despite having a Stratum X(*) clock in my office I haven't had to think about "time" in over 22 years, and I usually do not have to tinker with it much.
One of my first (of many) overtime events occurred as a result of the Y2K scare, when I had to babysit a CO when 1999 became 2000.
Little did we know that it would not be the last "all nighter" of 2000 but that's another story....

(*) Redacted. JIC.
https://www.mwrf.com/community/contributors/article/21849619/whats-the-difference-between-the-four-stratum-levels

 

I believe it was Marvin Berry that saw MJF and called his cousin Chuck to tell him about the new sound.

Skip to 720

 

Does this mean that my 'droid has a rapid internal drift rate, stacked atop an infrequent sync schedule?

 

Nope.
It only means that my 2 droids agree with by 2 apples and various network equipment in my office to within less than a second.

As they say in the car biz.....
YOUR mileage may vary.

 

It’s official: The leap second will be retired (a decade from now)

Well, just 'temporarily'. They are kicking this messy can down the road, to be revisited again in a century:

"Resolution D calls for UTC to go uninterrupted by leap seconds from 2035 until at least 2135 and for metrologists to eventually figure out how to reconcile the atomic and astronomical time scales with fewer headaches. The international time standard would be severed from time as told by the heavens for generations to come.

But rejoining those two time scales was imperative, said Rev. Pavel Gabor, an astrophysicist and the vice director of the Vatican Observatory Research Group in Tucson, Arizona. He said that atomic timekeeping was just one example of how the world was becoming incomprehensible to the average person and that scientists had a responsibility to help people feel in control of their lives."

Will a good solution be ready for implemented by 2135? Or will this become an even more complicated and expensive mess that people will then wish had been fixed a century earlier when the interconnected systems were still 'relatively' simple?

 

Will this create issues for non-networked GPSs? Assuming there are any old ones from before this decision still in service then, of course.

 

I'm not sure how it would cause them a problem. Internally, GPS has its own proper continuous clock, divorced from UTC's discontinuities, and would translate user outputs to UTC with just a simple look-up table. Now that table won't need any update for a really really long time.

The GPS clock would be a reasonable clock for virtually all computer timekeeping, except for one snag: it is controlled by the U.S. military, not by a neutral worldwide body of scientists / metrologists. Various other cellular and navigation clocks have a similar snag.

I believe TAI is still the current best "proper" clock, but it lacks the widespread distribution and easy accessibility of UTC. Note that UTC has always been derived from TAI, just offset by the accumulated number of leap seconds.

 

Ah, OK. I had a vague idea of the science, but I wasn't clear on that. Thank you.

I'm sorry. I shouldn't have made you spend time to type this. There's already one second of our lives that we're not getting back...

 

The time to explain it here is vastly less than the time needed to fix the consequences of computer systems interconnected with bad clock choices and designs.

By 2135, the combination of higher accuracy clocks, and stations spread much more widely across the solar system, likely means computer network timing will need to accommodate clock offsets and rate differences caused by general relativity. This will be more complicated than our current problem of networks getting scrambled by UTC leap seconds.

 

Meh...
Y2K 2.0

The Benefits and Challenges of Network Time Protocol (NTP)

 

Interesting thread. No, I don't believe in time travel or that aliens from another planet exist but with recent videos of unexplained flying objects, maybe future humans DO figure out how to send flying objects back in time! (Do they contain people? I doubt it...we already have flying objects, today, that don't need people to pilot them called drones.)
Why would future people send flying objects back in time? That's a good question and, I'm sure, will be the subject of many science fiction books/cartoons/TV shows!
If we knew the exact time and place Hitler would be standing, before WWII started, would we send an armed drone with a big bomb to take him out? Or would something so big threaten our existence in this time? Perhaps, and maybe the reason the objects seen aren't really doing anything (except defying the laws of physics). Experiments to see if it changes the course of history? Hmmm

 

... which mentions nothing about leap seconds.

I used NTP on my group's HPUX systems back in the early 90s, before we were forced over to WinDoz, though being a mostly analog and mixed hardware guy, didn't need to get too deep into the digital details. All the various ways I've understood NTP can be used to accommodate the extra second -- repeating a second, smearing it out over a day, slowing the clock for a number of seconds, etc., while fine for most computing needs, are problematic or simply unacceptable for certain applications. It doesn't help that normal UNIX system clocks have no room for a leap second. Though I have been away from any U*X systems for a very long time, so could easily have missed subsequent better solutions.

I do see reference to a Precision Time Protocol (PTP) that is based around atomic time (TAI), which is the time scale that leap-second-averse systems should have been built upon in the first place. And, whereas NTP gets its clients synchronized to within a few milliseconds, PTP appears to achieve sub-microsecond levels.