The following leap second shall be on June thirtieth, perhaps

Leap seconds are the additional seconds inserted occasionally to maintain exact atomic clocks higher synchronized with the rotation of the Earth. Scheduled for June thirtieth is the additional second 23:59:60 inserted between 23:59:59 and 00:00:00. Or perhaps not.

Tomorrow or Friday a vote could also be held on the Worldwide Telecommuncation Union (ITU) assembly in Geneva to abolish the leap second from the definition of UTC (Coordinated Universial Time). Which might imply StataCorp wouldn’t need to submit an replace to Stata to maintain the %tC format working appropriately.

As I’ve blogged earlier than—scroll right down to “Why Stata has two datetime encodings” in Utilizing dates and occasions from different software program—Stata helps each UTC time (%tC) and constant-86,400-seconds/day time (%tc). Stata does that as a result of some knowledge are collected utilizing leap-second corrected time, and a few uncorrected. Stata is exclusive or almost distinctive in offering each time codecs.

I learn that Google does one thing very intelligent: they strech the final second of the 12 months out when a leap second happens, so the info they gather doesn’t find yourself with ugly occasions like 23:59:60, and in order that it may be extra simply processed by software program that assumes a relentless 86,400 seconds per day.

The IT business and a lot of others, I collect, are fairly united concerning the advantages of scrapping the leap second.

The vote is predicted to go towards persevering with the leap second, in response to The Economist journal. The USA and France are for abolishing the leap second. Britain, Canada, and China are believed to be for persevering with it. Some 192 international locations will get to vote.

Whichever method the vote goes, I want to remind readers of recommendation I beforehand supplied to assist alleviate the necessity for leap seconds: Face west and throw rocks. As I beforehand famous, the profit shall be transitory if the rocks land again on Earth, so you must throw the rocks actually laborious. Having now thought extra about this subject, a much less strenuous method happens to me: Push rocks downhill or carry them towards the poles, and ideally do each. These options are designed to assault the true drawback, which is that the Earth is presently rotating too slowly.