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OT news / p2pnet: You’ve heard of leap year? Now meet leap second because that’s what’s going to happen when 2005 ticks over into 2006.
The last time a leap second came around was seven years ago and some experts think it should be abolished, "because the periodic, but random, adjustment of time imposes unreasonable and perhaps dangerous disruptions on precision software applications including cell phones, air traffic control and power grids," says the Washington Post.
"We’re going to look at what happens this year," the story has Naval Research Laboratory physicist Ronald Beard saying. "If there are no significant problems, the whole issue will go away, but I don’t expect that to happen."
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in Paris, France, decides when a leap second is needed, says the Globe & Mail, adding, "It tells national time laboratories, like the one at the National Research Council in Ottawa, to insert the extra second, either on the last day of June or the last day of December."
2006’s leap second will be the 23rd.
Also See:
Globe & Mail – Added Ticktock of the Clock Restarts Time Debate, December 26, 2005
Big Broom – Before your first kiss of 2006, wait a second, December 26, 2005
December 26th, 2005 at 8:15 pm
I guess this goes to show that no matter how we measure things, we are still behind. The metric was to be the world standard, a move that somehow didn’t make it to the US. For now, we have a mismash jumble mixture of both. Go pick up a container in the store that has a product on it and you will find the container volume listed in US imperial and in metric. They been doing that for years now but no move has been made to get it to totally metric.
Working on a car, what work a shade tree mechanic can do, means you have to have two sets of tools, one in US imperial standard, one in metric. No tool manufacturer is going to want to go the rest of the way. Those manufacturers are selling two tool sets to each mechanic where if the standards were ever to complete, they would be back to selling just one set of tools again; those of metric.
But this isn’t about the evils of corporations and businesses, this is about standards. So until we get on galatic standard we will always be off on our times. When is that coming down the pipes? We’ve been all this time without going that way. Lord knows we are off when it comes to galatic events and as a backward species, we are still on local time and measurement! (Enough of the poking fun.)
No matter what standard you use, there will always at some point be an adjustment necessary. Timing by vibration of cyrstal resonanances, once thought to be the most accurate of accurate has given way to timing on the atomic level. The next break through will most likely give us an exponnetial leap in time keeping but entrophy guarrenties there will be adjustments necessary. Simply we keep up and adjust or we fall behind. None of that will affect the price of eggs in China. They’ll still sell for the same price.