All I want for Christmas is a negative leap second

Blog » I just want to see it. Just once. I want to watch that earthquake ripple through all of global electronic timekeeping. I want to see which organisations make it to January morning with nothing on fire.



You know what a leap second is. The short version is that planet Earth is a terrible clock.

I love leap seconds. I love the unsolvable problem which birthed leap seconds, I love the technical challenge of implementing leap seconds, I love that they are rare and delightful and that they solve a problem, and I love that this solution is hugely irritating to a huge number of people who have more investment in and knowledge of time measurement than I do. It is a huge hassle to deal with leap seconds and I love that there is no universal agreement on how to deal with them. What should Unix time, for example, do during a leap second? Unix time is a simple number. There's no way to express 23:59:60. Should it stall for a second? Should it overrun for a second and then instantaneously ...