Offhand guess: most? all? cell phones are supposed to change their displayed time from 11:59 to 12:00 at 12:00:00. Think it makes more sense to show the rounded-to-the-nearest-minute time, changing to 12:00 at 11:59:30?
( Time.gov shows the time to the second, and apparently they do round it – it switches to 12:00:00 a half-second “early”.)
Huh? Why would a clock not show the actual time? It changes to 12 at 12. Not before.
That’s just absurd. I don’t want the estimated time. I want the actual time
Well, the actual time is only 12:00 for an instant. If you’re only displaying hours and minutes, then most of the time, your clock won’t show the actual time. When the actual time is 12:00:30, it’s neither 12:00 nor 12:01. The question is just how you want it to be incorrect.
But the convention is that clocks truncate time, rather than rounding it, and any departure from convention is likely to be more confusing than following it, regardless of whether the convention is logical or not.
And because light can only travel from the display to your eyes at light speed you’ll never see the actual time!
There is also the problem of relativistic adjustments required for altitude and latitude corrections.
Stranger
The proximity to high density objects will affect things as well.
This is why all of my mechanical chronometers are not only Antimagnetische but also Antigravitische. You can never be too careful about the chronometric effects of wandering quantum singularities,
Stranger
I once built a very accurate clock but it immediately turned into a black hole. Foiled by Heisenberg.
It’s bad form to round a already rounded number
14.59 rounded to the nearest digit is 15, rounded then again to the nearest 10’s is 20, though it should have been rounded to 10, the spacecraft then misses mars and ends up crashing onto some poor souls home in Uganda. Moral of the story, don’t re-reround that was rounded for you.
If it’s late enough in the day, should it round the date to tomorrow’s date?
Happy new year 2026
I always round to the nearest irrational number.
Stranger
Why not? That’s the way the Jewish calendar works.
I find this unlikely. Do you have a real cite, or is this your own conclusion?
As a matter of fact, Time.gov does seem to be changing on the second now. It wasn’t when I last checked it a couple weeks ago.
The way you check is to dial 303-499-7111 and listen, while watching the display change at Time.gov. Each UTC minute is supposed to start within 0.05 second of the start of the 0.8-second tone.
(WWV also gives the current estimate of the difference between UT1 (Earth time) and UTC. That’s what the double click at second number 1 means, at the moment – best guess is UT1 is 0.1 second later than UTC. So no need for a leap second this year.)
It was decided in 2022 to abandon leap seconds by 2035 at the latest. I don’t know if there will be any leap seconds between now and 2035, but I hope not.