NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Big names in tech want to ditch the leap seconds
From: John Clements
Date: 2022 Jul 27, 11:15 -0700
From: John Clements
Date: 2022 Jul 27, 11:15 -0700
This makes perfect sense to me. As a professor of Computer Science, I can say with authority something that should surprise no one: software is terrible, and full of bugs. We have no idea what we're doing. Or, to put it differently, no one is interested in actually spending the time and effort it would take to engineer carefully correct systems. I can see that doing away with leap seconds could potentially avoid some very serious problems.
As far as Celestial Navigation is concerned, it just sounds like one more row in the sight table: UT1 offset seconds ? Print it on every page of the nautical almanac, it won't take much space.
Am I missing something obvious?
John
