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Tonight you will have one extra second with which to celebrate the new year. A leap second, to be exact. This leap second is not a unique event – in the last 40 years, there have been 22 leap seconds. The last one occured in 1998.
The reason for the leap second is because of disputes between astronomers and physicists. Traditionally, our time scale is based upon the rotation of the Earth on its axis, as well as its rotation around the sun. However, this time is not a constant – that is, the length of a day has been ever-so-slowly increasing for many years. Physicists would rather have time be a constant, and thus invented the atomic clock and an exact time measurement. In order to keep the atomic clock in sync with the rotation of the Earth, leap seconds are added to the clock every few years.
How will you spend your leap second?
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I spent it drinking champagne and laughing out my NYC apartment window at all the other drunk people below!
While in the Air Force, during the late 70’s and early 80’s, I worked in the field of PMEL (Precision Measuring Equipment Laborary) or Metrology. Metrology is the science of weights and measures or of measurement. While in this field I also received addition training in the field of Horology, the science of measuring time. One of my primary jobs was to maintain the cesium beam clocks used for communications on the flying command post. I had to keep these clock set to better than 10 microseconds (10 millionths of one second). If a leap second was imposed, I would need to be available to make the 1 second time shift in the event that the command post was activated and clocks needed. You probably now realize how I chose my user name, many people think it had something to do with music.
Damn thats pretty intresting MeasureMan. Pretty cool!
RATS!! I slept right through it.
No, you got an extra second of sleep. I know I used mine to take another drink of sparkling cider…
BTW, interesting stuff MeasureMan.
Heres a fact…
A few years ago, so many pigeons were perching on the miniute hand of Big Ben, they actully made the clock 5 miniutes slow!
First time in history!
scamp, Amazing.
I HATE pigeons.. but not as much as I hate horses, elephants, cows, goats, and geese.
Dang it. I missed it. When’s the next one.
Robert H. Goretsky says I wonder if computers are ever adjusted for these extra seconds — A 20-year-old system could be off by 10 seconds or so, according to this. While that doesn’t sound like much, in timing-critical applications, such as stock trading, a few seconds could have a huge effect. I assume that those systems periodically sync up to an atomic clock, which would have made the adjustment. Then again, some of these older systems required millions of dollars of adjustments prior to the year 2000 just to know what year it was! Comment from Robert H. Goretsky of Hoboken, NJ