2008 goes into one-second overtime As if the leap day in February wasn't enough stalling for time, scientists intend to delay the arrival of 2009 by one additional second. Timekeepers will tack on a "leap second" to the world's clocks December 31, 2008 at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The occasional chrono-adjustment is …
However how does one translate a yoctosecond into the El Reg standard of weights and measures?? If there isn't one I suggest it be equivalent to the amount of time between someone completing a windows install and finding the computer has been compromised. Or perhaps the time between the posting of a "Fail and you" article and someone commenting on Ted's language.
At ten-to-the-minus-two-dozen each, you'll have rather a lot more than just several million yoctoseconds to add to your New Year's Eve bash.
...and just why is there not time unit on the highly useful
http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html
page? Eh? Eh? If New York can have the "New York Second" (the time it takes for the taxi driver behind you to blow his horn after the traffic light turns green) why not an "El Reg Jiffy"? The Windows-installation-completion to first-compromise will do nicely. How about a compo for this Friday?
The point in UTC is that it is perfectly consistent, always, and we need that for all sorts of things, whereas UT1 isn't consistent - it's slowing. So UTC needs to be paused because otherwise, eventually, at some point in the distant future, they'll fall way out of sync and the sun will rise in the evening and set in the morning.
The alternative is to recalibrate "time" to match UT1, but that would mean updating a lot of books and a fair few laws of physics. Also, UT1 is a moving target - it's slowing, so we'd constantly have to be updating stuff.
The leap-second occurs at a set point in time, ie. midnight UTC. So everybody who doesn't live in the UTC timezone (UK, Ireland, Iceland, Portugal or Morocco) will have the leap-second at some other time, most of you (Europe, Asia, Australia) sometime in early 2009. For me in CADST (that's Central Australian Daylight Savings Time), it's 10:30am on Jan 1, 2009.
My watch will be fast again..... And every time they insert another of those leap events, it brings my date and time of death forward.... Life's short enough already, why don't these guys think?
Time to leave, methinks
Coat, cos I don' want to listen to guys who don't get the joke trying to explain it to me...
Leap seconds are under threat and may be abolished in future years, allowing UTC shown by your clock to drift away from UT which the the time of the day according to where the sun is over the future centuries.
This is being proposed because the earth's rotation is slowing, so soon we'll need one leap second a year, and next century we will need 2 leap seconds a year, later still one a month and eventually one a day. Even in the sort term that means too many changes to clocks in precision systems such as GPS.
However I see it as being a victory for numbers and a defeat for humans. In the past we defined units from practical observations such as a second being 1/86400th of a day, now it is based caesum atoms and cant be changed to reflect the world as we find it.
So what happens when you phone the speaking clock?
"At the third beep the time will be 23:59:60, beep, beep, beep"
or
"At the third beep, the time will be nearly 00:00, beep, beep, beep"
or
"At the fourth beep, the time will be 00:00, ....."
Paris ? She'll need to take her Gucci watch to get fixed.
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