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1r0ut3 OP t1_ix1hf79 wrote

Reply to comment by jorge1209 in The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks by 1r0ut3

Wait, are saying that NASA lied to us? In that case I'm fine with any option as long as we keep blowing stuff up.

>From VLBI, scientists have learned that Earth is not the most reliable
timekeeper. The planet's rotation is slowing down overall because of
tidal forces between Earth and the moon. Roughly every 100 years, the
day gets about 1.4 milliseconds, or 1.4 thousandths of a second, longer.
Granted, that's about 100 or 200 times faster than the blink of an eye.
But if you add up that small discrepancy every day for years and years,
it can make a very big difference indeed.

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/extra-second.html

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jorge1209 t1_ix1oag3 wrote

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/negative-leap-second.html

Total forces set the general trend and in a thousand years or so we would have to deal with the fact that using 1970 definitions of 1 second = do many vibrations of a cesium atom and 1day = 86400 seconds, we would need to add a leap second almost every day.

But over the shorter time frame there is substantially more variability. So much so that there was actually discussion of a negative leap second.

At that point the big tech companies really put their feet down and said "enough with this bullshit" because removing a second is in some ways an even more complex engineering task than adding one.

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