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We introduce the so-called doubling metric on the collection of non-empty bounded open subsets of a metric space. Given an open subset U of a metric space X, the predecessor U_∗ of U is defined by doubling the radii of all open balls contained inside U, and taking their union. The predecessor of U is an open set containing U. The directed doubling distance between U and another subset V is the number of times that the predecessor operation needs to be applied to U to obtain a set that contains V. Finally, the doubling distance between open sets U and V is the maximum of the directed distance between U and V and the directed distance between V and U.

We consider reparametrizations of Heisenberg nilflows.We show that if a Heisenberg nilflow is uniquely ergodic, all non-trivial timechanges within a dense subspace of smooth time-changes are mixing. Equivalently, in the language of special flows, we consider special flows over linear skew-shift extensions of irrational rotations of the circle. Without assuming any Diophantine condition on the frequency, we define a dense class of smooth roof functions for which the corresponding special flows are mixing whenever the roof function is not a coboundary. Mixing is produced by a mechanism known as stretching of ergodic sums. The complement of the set of mixing time-changes (or, equivalently, of mixing roof functions) has countable codimension and can be explicitly described in terms of the invariant distributions for the nilflow (or, equivalently,for the skew-shift), producing concrete examples of mixing time-changes.

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