Talk:2266: Leap Smearing

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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Although to be fair, leap seconds are confusing. Unpopular Opinions (talk) 04:08, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Leap seconds are idiotic. The only people who care about keeping the Earth tied to the time are astronomers. And no one cares about them.SDSpivey (talk) 04:56, 11 February 2020 (UTC) Oh, you'll care about leap seconds when your GPS starts failing, i assure you.

Leap seconds are a mess, but so is changing the definition of UTC and letting it drift away from solar time. There are movements to try to make this change, but there are significant obstacles. (For example, the signatories to the 1884 International Meridian Conference agreed that the civil time everyone should use is based on mean solar time, and US Federal Law indicates that the legal time of the US is based on mean solar time.) Zmatt (talk) 06:30, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
If we don't use leap seconds, then the GPS won't use them either. How many seconds difference before we humans could even notice? A century's worth or more, I'm certain. By then we could just fix the wobble of the Earth. SDSpivey (talk) 07:33, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
1. You use “we humans”, who do you think is studying and correcting with leap seconds? Robots? 2. I don’t think you realize just how quickly that would cause problems. “That Guy from the Netherlands” (talk) 12:52, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
Leap seconds are added rougly every couple of years. If we stopped, it would take about a century to be off by a minute, and 6,000 years to be off by an hour. So maybe we should just plan on every 6K years we skip Daylight Saving Time to recover that hour. Barmar (talk) 16:26, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

I believe the actual time would be 11:42am (on the 11th of February). Dakranon (talk) 06:20, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

But the comic was released on 10t February Monday as always, but the date was written wrongly on the comic here. I have treid to calculate the time on February 10th. --Kynde (talk) 08:21, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

I think there is an error in the calculations given in the explanation, but it's possible some bistromathics got involved instead. By my reckoning, 24 hours smeared over 28 "days" make each "day" 24/28 hours (≈ 51 minutes, 26 seconds) longer than a day instead of 24/29. Also, conveniently for my calculations, the end of "14 February" should be exactly halfway through the month, meaning the CEO should have until exactly noon on the 15th to get away with the given excuse (12 extra hours, not 11). 172.69.33.239 10:27, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

You guys are all missing the point! We should apply non-leap smearing to the other 11 months so that EVERY month has 28 days. No more crazy calendar day-shifting: if you were born on a Monday(e.g.) your birthday will always be Monday. Cellocgw (talk) 15:06, 11 February 2020 (UTC)