Header image

Midnight in the Desert

 

Menu

Skip to content
  • Home
  • Radio Show
    • Advertise on MITD
    • Contact Us
    • Radio Stations
    • Guests By Date
    • Guests A-Z
    • Audio Clips
    • SYNDICATION
  • Members
    • Subscribe to MITD Archives
    • Show Archives (members)
    • The Wormhole (members)
  • Daily News
  • Old Stuff
    • Graphic Arts
    • Cats
    • Media Coverage
    • Albums
  • Syndication

How to Handle This Year’s Extra Second: ‘Smear’ It

Posted on December 28, 2016 in Oddities | 318 Views | Leave a response

(NEWSER) – For many, 2016 can’t end soon enough. For everyone, though, it’s actually going to last one second longer than usual. With New Year’s Eve approaching, outlets such as Phys.org are reminding people that an extra “leap second” will be added to the final day of 2016 in order to keep our earthly time-keeping measures in sync. No, this won’t affect countdowns to ball drops—the second is incorporated into the day in far more subtle ways—but if you happened to watch the online clock counting Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, you’d see the quirk of it going from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60, instead of flipping to 00:00:00. A more technical explanation: “Leap seconds are added in order to keep the difference between UTC and astronomical time (UT1) to less than 0.9 seconds,” per the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Wonky, yes, but for companies such as Google that operate Network Time Protocol servers, the leap second is indeed a big deal—and a post at Popular Mechanics praises the company’s “extremely elegant solution” to the issue. Google will “smear” that extra second, as it explains in a blog post. “Instead of adding a single extra second to the end of the day, we’ll run the clocks 0.0014% slower across the ten hours before and ten hours after the leap second, and ‘smear’ the extra second across these twenty hours.” Other cloud companies such as Akamai use a similar approach but over 24 hours, notes PCWorld, which expects this longer “leap smear” to be standard when the next leap second rolls around, probably in 2018. (If you’re planning a trip to ring in 2017 somewhere, this list might help.)

Read More: Newser

Posted in Oddities | Tagged clocks, leap year, time

Related Posts

We Can’t Alter The Flow of Time But, According to Physics, We Can Bend It→

Stephen Hawking thinks he knows what happened before the beginning of time→

Where Did Time Come From, and Why Does It Seem to Flow?→

Time for a change in the way we tell time?→

CALL-IN


FIRST TIME CALLER LINE
844-912-1333

WILD CARD LINE
850-446-9453(WILD)

The Wormhole

Send Message to Host

DarkMatterDigitalNetwork

Follow and Like Us Everywhere

Midnight in the Desert

Facebook      Twitter     Facebook 

Dark Matter Network

Twitter    Dlive   Twitch      Periscope   YouTube     Facebook     TuneIn

Important Posts

  • Advertising and Sponsorships

    December 12, 2015
  • FAQ

    December 11, 2015
  • Become an Affiliate

    October 1, 2015
  • Finding MITD on CC-Wifi Radios

    September 29, 2015
 
 
 

Midnight in the Desert

Facebook  Twitter  Facebook

Dark Matter Network

Twitter  Dlive   Twitch Periscope  YouTube  Facebook  TuneIn
 

©2020

Menu

  • Contact Us
  • Take Down Requests
  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy
  • About Us