Monday, December 26, 2005

S^2: Start of 2006 delayed by a leap second!

CNN Uncut

Scientists are delaying the start of 2006 by the first "leap second" in seven years, a timing tweak meant to make up for the changes in the Earth's rotation. In other words, a leap second is added to keep uniform timekeeping within 0.9 second of the Earth's rotational time which can speed up or slow down because of many factors including the oceanic tides we've seen off late.

The adjustment will be carried out by sticking an extra second into the atomic clocks worldwide at the stroke of midnight Coordinated Universal time, the widely adopted international standard. So, they will read 23:59:60 at that moment before rolling over to all zeros.

Deciding when to introduce the leap second is the responsibility of International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service and the preference for leap seconds is Dec. 31st or June 30th.

2 Comments:

Blogger divide_by_zero said...

Interesting! The quals is the PhD qualifying exam. It is a presentation for a committee of faculty, and it marks approximately the half way mark for a phd..

1:05 AM  
Blogger Padmanaban Kumar (Paddu @ Just for Kicks) said...

Waw! Thats nice. Now the real congrats, Sundar!

6:30 PM  

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