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Today the xkcd: Y2K and 2038 comic was published and this reminded me of the recent very good technical blog post Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so... from Jan Schaumann where he explains how time is handled on different operating systems including some historical background.
A famous scientist and adventurer once said: 'time is not linear but something like "Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey"'. He has since been proven more correct than he ever imagined.
As you well know, on Unix systems we measure time as the number of seconds since "the epoch": 00:00:00 UTC on January 1st, 1970. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
For starters, this definition is not based on something sensical such as, say, the objective frequency of vibration of a Cesium-133 atom, but on a convenient fraction of the time it takes a particular large rock to complete a full rotation around its own axis.
If you want to learning about any of this:
- Initially the time was measured in 1/60ths of a second
- At least one country has two different utility frequency
- Why Linux will fail again on 23rd April 2262 even with 64-bit counters
- How different operating systems behave around the beginning or end of the epoch
- What will happen with positive or negative leap seconds
then click here and read this fine blog posting.
Happy reading and learning!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday November 14 2022, @01:51AM (3 children)
Now that we know a lot more about the Earth's movement, maybe we should update our timekeeping? The way leap seconds are added is arbitrary. We could do better.
The Gregorian calendar is based on the flawed premise that the Earth is eternally unchanging. But now we know the Earth's rotation is gradually slowing. Shouldn't be too hard to model that mathematically. Why not do so, and build that into our timekeeping systems? That should last until we become a type II civilization capable of greatly altering the Earth's rotation and orbit.
Shouldn't have to do anything as drastic as they did in 1582, dropping a week and a half. In 1582, there was no Oct 5 through Oct 14.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 14 2022, @02:08AM
The long term trend will be a slowing rotation, primarily due to tidal forces from the moon, but this is not necessarily true on short-term scales relevant to human activity. In fact, over the last several years the Earth's rotation has been speeding up year over year.
Moreover, geological events like earthquakes can have significant effects on the earth's rotation and are (probably) not predictable with mathematical models like you describe.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Monday November 14 2022, @10:35AM (1 child)
We should create a conspiracy nuttery around these missing dates.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 15 2022, @05:51AM
Yeah, clearly the illuminati want us to believe those dates don't exist because they did something very evil at those dates, and if that evil action is leaked, nobody is going to believe it because it happened at dates that "don't exist". :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.