I feel the earth move under my feet

Personally, I believe everyone in our solar system should settle upon a single time zone, a single time standard, and we should all stop being so provincial in our thinking. The most-adopted and most-popular time standards in communications, networking and computing are Unix Time in the UTC time zone. Unix Time is the number of seconds since Unix was created (on January 1, 1970) and the time zone called universal coordinated time or temps universel coordonné (UTC) is the standard timezone in which almost all computer system clocks are set. Folks in the military sometimes use "zulu" time, consisting of 4 digits and a trailing z, as in "1655z." The time zone "z" is UTC.  The 4 digits are 24-hour HHMM. If we adopt this standard,  eventually we could all drop the "z" and we would all share the meaning of what time it is in 4 digits. Wouldn't that be wonderful?  The main problem with UTC and our time standards is the "leap second."  Recently, the earth recorded its shortest day ever because earth's geographical poles (not the magnetic poles) moved so quickly. Normally earth's rotation is sped up by tides or earthquakes (tectonic shifts). Leap seconds were invented to add or subtract a second from UTC time to account for these changes in earth's rotation.  What a clumsy hack!

There is a much-better standard than UTC, proposed in the 1970's and created by a now-defunct department of the French government (whose officials were called seigneurs du temps or time lords). The standard can keep track of the number of attoseconds since the big bang formation of the universe in our local general relativistic sphere.  The standard is called International Atomic Time or temps atomique international (TAI). But very few of us bother to install the code libraries and use TAI for our logging timestamps or other purposes because people are lazy; they find it inconvenient to convert to and from the standard Unix Time in UTC that is used in the rest of our software and conventions.  But think about it: Time Lords!  C'mon man.  Conversions are not that hard.

Now Meta (Facebook) has joined the anti-leap second fray.  The discussions in Dubai next year should be interesting.

Hommage to Carol King for the title of this post.