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No More Leap Second?
WerewulfX writes "CNN reports: "In a phenomenon that has scientists puzzled, the Earth is right on schedule for a fifth straight year." Update yeah, this is a repost. Whatever- it's a holiday. Nothing else to post :)
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Those poor souls who are born on that second aren't going to have a birthday. T_T
Slashdot dupes are, as always, right on time!
webpage
the dupe second?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Who says that the extra second wasn't just deja vu? I know that I could have sworn I saw this post before.
Exactly how do they figure out where the Earth is supposed to be down to a given second?
I understand Atomic clocks and how they work - but I don't understand how scientists can deduce where the earth should be to the exact second and correct it as such.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
And I only had 107,993 years left before my nefarios plan to come to work a half-hour late every day.
Will we see more el ninjo effects
I hope so! El Ninjo is the bad-assest Mexican Ninja ever!
How about instead of replacing slashdot, Taco just gives a hundred or so random subscribers the ability to mod a story as a dupe before it is officially posted for everyone else to read? It wouldn't be much harder to implement then mod points or metamoderation. If it wasn't a dupe then noone would have to do anything, but if it was a dupe then those "lucky" few could get someone's attention by clicking a "This is a dupe" link. Regards, Steve
Actually, 1024 bits is 128 bytes, not 1, nor 1000.
this article is soooo last year
I don't think this should be that suprising. It is widely known that the moon's orbit is increasing. The effects of this is slowly causing the tides to be less severe. It is also slowing the earth's rotation. Eventually the moon will be in orbit around the equator, and there will be no more tide. I think there might be a good chance that the loss of the leap second could be related to this.
Don't waste time... procrastinate now!
Spare me please. You all are the biggest bunch of need-something-to-whine-about babies I have seen in a good long time. So what if something was double posted? It takes half a second to scan the headline and realize that its a repeat. You take more time crawling all over each other to be the first to whine/complain/joke about the repeated story. For God sakes, ignore the post if your time is so precious! "HELLO? What is the problem? I doubt I'll donate to Slashdot again!" That is the saddest sentence I have ever had the misfortune of reading. Slashdot pours all kinds of blessings upon us geeks daily and you refuse to contribute BECAUSE A STORY WAS REPEATED? GOD FORBID! Burn them at the stake! They have wasted your precious half of a second! Seriously folks, cry me a river.
One second out of 31536000 is not considered significant.
And all that energy to matter conversion has increased the mass of the Earth. Which has increased its gravatational field, and the effects of everything elses field on it. Thus the earth is moving faster.
Or possibly space dust.
If the Earth is assumed to be a homogeneous sphere and the rotational axis is assumed to be the straight line passing through the north and south geographic poles, the moment of inertia of the Earth is I = MR^2 where M is the total mass of the Earth and R is its radius. The kinetic energy of a rotating Earth is given by K = 1/2 I w^2, where w is the angular velocity.
The energy associated with an angular velocity which is increased by 1 second over a year is equivalent to an extra 1.6e22 Joules of energy or 40 times the annual energy consumption of mankind (DoE 1999). A detailed analysis and matlab script are available here
Yeah, this is a rereply. Whatever. It's a holiday. Nothing else to reply to.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
But haven't you seen their new advertising campaign? They've reformed! Everyone likes AOL now, even Snoop Dogg!
I personally expected them to give up on their CDs a while ago, but there's no accounting for marketing...
True story.
Update yeah, this is a repost. Whatever- it's a holiday. Nothing else to post
Sure there is. You could post about how the Stardust probe is about to enter a comet's tail, or perhaps India's plans for a hypersonic plane, or even the chnaging face of offshore programming...
Someone's overclocking the Matrix!
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
Well the earth is on time due to the massively successful launching into space of all the world's boy bands and all that casts of all the reality shows.
I mean NASA did actually get that done right?
CNN Says:
For 28 years, scientists repeated the procedure [of adding a leap second]. But in 1999, they discovered the Earth was no longer lagging behind.
Um, not exactly true. Not every year over the last 28 years has had a leap second. For example, 1984, 1986 and 1987 didn't have a leap second. It's generally determined if a leap second is necessary about 6 months ahead of time by IERS. However, this is the first 5 year gap of no leap seconds.
It's interesting to note that the "leap second protocol" permits a "reverse" leap second - meaning a "short" minute. This is because the folks involved in defining the leap second realized that the rotation of the earth is not 100% predictable, and therefore they theorized that there could be a "fast spinning year" that would merit the loss of a second. This hasn't happened yet.
This whole rotation-of-earth-isn't-constant idea is pretty new (50 years). So just because we have a 5 year period of smaller rotaional speed deltas isn't totally unexpected.
Actually, not only is the article a dupe, but I just saw the old article linked on google news!
My new year's prediction: this article, having found a niche, will be continually resubmitted by clueless slashdot readers, reposted, and picked up by automated news services in a never-ending cycle of google-reader-slashdot that will ultimately threaten the very fabric of the internet itself!!
Hey. It's as plausible of any other prediction I've read today...
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Heal itself? That implies that there is something natural about the 24-hour day. The Earth's rotation rate has been decreasing for billions of years. An Earth day was approximately 18 hours in duration 900 million years ago.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
> i'm bad with physics, but i guess the sun's mass ... anyone smarter
> isn't constant over time,
> try to explain this?
I am a PhD student in mathematical physics, but I'm afraid I don't have a complete answer for you.
Technically the Sun's mass is decreasing due to solar wind, neutrinos and light (light doesn't have rest mass, but it still carries away energy). However, the change caused by this is so minuscule you can neglect it for the purpose of Earth's orbit. The difference will not be measurable.
A change in the mass of the Earth-moon system should not have an measurable effect on the period of the orbit either (as long as it remains small compared to that of the Sun).
General Relativity predicts a decrease in the orbital period, but it's so tiny that the only planet for which this is even measurable is Mercury (because its so close to the Sun). So I assure you that this is not it either.
In conclusion, I don't know why Earth's year had been decreasing, anymore than those scientists know why it stopped. This is not something that is predicted by any theory that I am familiar with.
I have a friend who specializes in solar system dynamics. Maybe I'll ask her if she has heard about this.
Cheers.
Every time you bother to suggest something to CmdrTaco, he'll either never reply or respond with a really nasty, sarcastic e-mail.
Taco really abhors change that isn't his. Especially if it's something that's already implemented elsewhere (i.e., Kuro5hin), they'll claim it "doesn't scale well."
Slashdot is behind the times. Its userbase has become a joke of groupthink and trolls, and the editors don't even read their links or posted stories anymore. It still has the momentum of a large fanbase, however, which just increases the stupidity because we have all these mistakes happening in front of a huge readership.
"Sufferin' succotash."
To make the world's official time agree with where the Earth actually is in space, scientists in 1972 started adding an extra "leap second" on the last day of the year.
"Where earth actually is in space"?
As HopeOS said when the previous article was posted:
"Leap seconds, as pointed out, are an entirely different beast, and are meant to shore up the discrepency between our actual rotation and the atomic clocks we use."
That's why. This has nothing to do with rotations around our sun, just around our own axis.
At the National Institute for Science and Technology in Boulder, spokesman Fred McGehan said most scientists agree the Earth's orbit around the sun has been gradually slowing for millennia.
Assuming this is true and this is the actual news here, the reporter (and the writer of the other article) shouldn't have started talking about leap seconds in the first place since these aren't added to compensate for that.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Particularly, the monsoon season I believe has the largest effect, particularly because the generated winds impact the himalayan mountains.
The combination of a large (albeit distributed) force impacting a large object (himalayas) affects the angular velocity of the earth.
I learned this first because a friend was writing an ephermeris program and got in contact with the guy an NIST who tracks these things. I beleive they can make some predictions of change in rotational velocity based on the force of observed storms.
Also the Navy has built an array of (radio or laser, I forget) interferrometers located in (I believe) the rocky mountains which are used to measure the actual variances against star positions.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
When (greater) Sweden was going to change from Julian to Gregorian calendar they stuffed it up, got one day out of sync with all Julian countries, so to get back in sync they added an extra leap day, creating the only 30th Feb in history.
They eventually made the change from Julian in 1753 by having (gregorian) 1st Mar 1753 after (julian) 17 Feb 1753 removing ten days.
Makes a leap second seem a bit insignificant....
If you have no idea about Julian (as in Ceasar) and Gregorian (as in pope) calendars, have a look here