A Quick Update
by Richard
Hard to believe, even with all the extra time yesterday, that I couldn’t fit in a post.
Wait. You don’t know what I’m talking about? What, you ask, extra time?
Well, let me tell you.
Apparently, yesterday, June 30, 2012, was longer than it was supposed to be. For all of an entire extra second.
No joke.
The last minute of June 30, 2012 is destined to be 61 seconds long, for timekeepers are to add a “leap second” to compensate for the wibbly-wobbly movements of our world.
The ever-so-brief halting of the second hand will compensate for a creeping divergence from solar time, meaning the period required for Earth to complete a day.
It all comes down to the Earth’s little wiggle when it struts around the sun, showing off for every Mars, Pluto and Jupiter with the eyes to see.
The planet takes just over 86,400 seconds for a 360-degree revolution.
But it wobbles on its axis and is affected by the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon and the ocean tides, all of which brake the rotation by a tiny sliver of a second.
As a result, Earth gets out of step with International Atomic Time (TAI), which uses the pulsation of atoms to measure time to an accuracy of several billionths of a second.
And so, every once in a while, horologists (scientists studying horos (hours)) give the 86,400-second day an extra second, a little gift to make sure TAI and solar time don’t get too far out of whack.
And, thus, we had some extra time.
And still I couldn’t fit in the time to post something witty and touching. Not that I do that most any other time, but still. . . It would have been nice to have something.
Sorry. I’ll try to be at least witty tomorrow.
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