Leap Second To Be Added Dec 31, 2008

ammorris writes "Don't be the laughingstock of your friends when you shout 'Happy New Years' a second too early ... The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service has announced that a leap second will be added on December 31, 2008 at 23h 59m 60s, meaning that this year will be exactly one second longer. The last leap second occurred Dec 31, 2005; they are added due to fluctuations in the rotational speed of the earth. You can read all about leap seconds on Wikipedia."

Comments

Re:legally speaking, it's the first leap for the U

[timmarhy]

well, the USA has also legally declared the tomatoe to be a vegtable, even though it's not (it's actually a berry..). i guess it's what happens when a nation has to low brow everything.

Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's so very true.

For the layman, "rope theory" is an extension of string theory which describes how strings and branes behave at the macroscopic level. The famous "Brown Rope" problem raises insightful questions and the answers to them are most informative. To expand on the parent's point, dark ropes tend to be very messy. In an ideal situation the rope is dropped with little perturbance and viscosity which results in the rope-dropper exercising translational and rotational motion away from the point of the original rope-dropping.

Now, take for example an alternate scenario: One in which the perturbance and coefficient of viscosity of the rope are very high. In this case, the case which the parent describes, the rope exhibits a sort of "stickiness". When a "sticky" rope drops, the dropper does not "have" the rope, the rope "has" them because the viscosity of the rope effectively binds the "dropper" to the aforementioned point of rope-dropping.

The problem of the sticky rope is best solved through an iterative approach. Wipe, wipe, flush, repeat until the working density of the rope approximately equals zero. The desired level of precision is dependent on the number of iterations computed at a trade-off of time vs. precision, though with modern technology high precision tends to be most popular result.