The new year will be one second later

[mdlbear]

The headline in The Times is "Earth's time lords make new year wait a second", but it's serious business. This year's leap second will occur at midnight, 2005-12-31 11:59:60 UTC. Think about that time for a moment.

This will be the first leap-second since 1998. It's the subject of a great kurfuffle between the astronomers represented by the Time Lords of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (based in Paris) and the US delegation to the International Telecommunication Union. The astronomers naturally want atomic time and astronomical time to match up as closely as possible; the US (representing the computer industry) wants to avoid irregularly-spaced corrections that mess up software that wasn't written to accomodate them. Programmers just want to be able to compute the interval between any two dates without having to consult a manually-maintained table. This becomes important if you need to know the exact time in January, 2038 when 32-bit Unix date-codes roll over.

Comments

[almeda.livejournal.com]

Well, the Sumatra earthquake (that spawned The Christmas Tsunami) sped up the earth's rotation enough to shorten that day by three milliseconds, so folks THAT picky about time have to keep in mind ALL kinds of adjustments, not just preplanned leap seconds.

[mdlbear]

They add (or subtract) a leap-second whenever the accumulated difference adds up to 0.9sec. They're not preplanned apart from being scheduled for the end of June or the end of December.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

My favorite, so far, was the suggestion that we let the seconds go by until the an hour has built up. Obviously made by someone who never looks outside his window. Let's go back to local solar time!

And what's this stuff about "universal" time, anyway?

[mdlbear]

Well, we all know that Paris is the center of the universe... (or at least the French know it).

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

*blink*

Earth has Time Lords? I thought they all came from Gallifrey...