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Rilly?

U.S. News & World Report

2016 Will Be Longer Than Usual, Thanks to a Leap Second

How many 2016’s do we have to compare the length with?

7 thoughts on “Rilly?”

  1. Bloke in North Dorset

    Its bollocks anyway, leap seconds are added fairly regularly:

    Before the first leap second was added in 1972, UTC was 10 seconds behind Atomic Time. So far, a total of 26 leap seconds have been added. This means that the Earth has slowed down an additional 26 seconds compared to atomic time since then.
    However, this does NOT mean that the days are 26 seconds longer nowadays. The only difference is that the days a leap second was added had 86,401 seconds instead of the usual 86,400 seconds.

    If 26 have been added in 43 years it looks more like leap seconds are the norm.

  2. If we counted 45 minutes as an hour, we could get 32 hours in the day. Allow your standard 8 hours sleep and you get 24 hours to work. Think of the productivity potential!

    Also, it would not take long before we made up the 11 days lost when we went on to the Gregorian calendar.

  3. Bloke in Costa Rica

    It’s of very dubious importance anyway: Unix and Unix-like operating systems running a quasi-modern implementation of NTP will have the leap second announced to the kernel, which will handle it transparently. In some kernels, it just puts a thumb on the PLL so the second is silently inserted and the wall clock time goes from 23:59:59 to 00:00:00 as per normal.

    No idea how Windows handles it. If it shits the bed occasionally I wouldn’t be surprised.

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