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There's another meeting, or maybe there's a meeting next year, or maybe the meeting ended in July. And leap seconds have finally been banished! Or maybe not. :)

To get a sense of this on again, off again story, you can go to Google News and search on "leap seconds". I did that just now, and it's actually revealing. This link should take you directly to the search results: Google News: results for leap seconds. The first few results show recent coverage from CNN and others this week. That's fine. Worth a peek. But continue scrolling in the search results. Hey, look: there were a bunch of articles around July 9 this year, too! And scroll some more... and more... It's fascinating how long the same headlines have been trotted out and how many times in the past 15 years the leap second has been killed off. But it just won't die. :)

Amusement aside, there is really a critical event on the horizon that is worth avoiding: the dreaded "negative leap second". Contrary to expectations even as recently as 15 years ago (yes, again), the disagreement between atomic time and Earth rotation time has not continued its positive march requiring, as it did for so long, one additional second added to the calendar just before midnight on 31 December of most years (not every year, and sometimes the addition was in the middle of the year). Instead, the planet Earth decided to prove that it would not be governed by our puny bureaucratic accounting, and the discrepancy came to a halt. And now it has drifted just enough in the other direction, very slowly, that one second would have to be deleted from the calendar at some date in the very near future. And that would be bad. That would be very bad because not one line of code has been tested for the numerous tech systems that keep track of such things. Because, of course, it has never happened before. And no one in the past few decades really entertained the notion seriously that it might happen!

The plan then is to pull thr trigger and kill off the whole process. No more leap seconds, neither negative nor positive. This would be, in effect, a change in the definition of UTC. Some even insist that UTC would cease to exist, and we would need a new set of three letters to describe our time-keeping. We could call it UTX... or maybe just UTD (because 'D' follows 'C' and we can retronym it later). Bottom line: the rules must be formally changed, and leap seconds get cancelled permanently. This time... for real.

Maybe. :)

Frank Reed