NASA Explains Why June 30 Will Get Extra Second

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Oh hell yes! An extra second? I am totally sleeping in on Tuesday!

The day will officially be a bit longer than usual on Tuesday, June 30, 2015, because an extra second, or “leap” second, will be added. “Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down a bit, so leap seconds are a way to account for that,” said Daniel MacMillan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
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Not often I feel like I can say this... but that NASA article seems like it was written by a proper news writer, i.e. saying really stupid fucking shit in it.

This difference of 2 milliseconds, or two thousandths of a second – far less than the blink of an eye – hardly seems noticeable at first. But if this small discrepancy were repeated every day for an entire year, it would add up to almost a second. In reality, that’s not quite what happens.
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Yes that's not quite what happens, because that 2 ms change is over 100 years, not a single day, so why even make that comparison at all?

Scientists monitor how long it takes Earth to complete a full rotation using an extremely precise technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). These measurements are conducted by a worldwide network of stations, with Goddard providing essential coordination of VLBI, as well as analyzing and archiving the data collected.
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This doesn't sound right in my mind, VLBI is a technique that gives extremely high resolution detail with a series of radio telescopes. The idea is you track Earth's rotation compared to something really far away which doesn't move much with respect to us, so you can use that object to see how much Earth has moved. Yet they don't explain this for 6 more paragraphs, after boring the reader with some other topic, they decide to come back to what VLBI really is.

I know they're trying to dumb down these articles for the average Joe but man, at least write it right.
 
As a software engineer, I wish leap seconds would just die. Them and daylight savings time pretty much insure that the time will wrong somewhere in my program.

And who cares if their sun dial is off by 35 seconds? Not this guy.
 
wright_left said:
As a software engineer, I wish leap seconds would just die. Them and daylight savings time pretty much insure that the time will wrong somewhere in my program.

And who cares if their sun dial is off by 35 seconds? Not this guy.
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At least with leap seconds, if your program manages not to crash, you can ignore them, mostly. DST on the other hand really messes up any ability to reason about future times.
 
So what causes the Earths rotation to slow down? Is it:

A. The dark side of the Moon

B: Man made global warming
 
westrock2000 said:
So what causes the Earths rotation to slow down? Is it:

A. The dark side of the Moon

B: Man made global warming
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It is exactly the opposite.

Global warming is caused by:

1. The dark side of the moon

2. Earth's rotation slowing down.

To fix this, we must, without delay, find a way to speed up the rotation of the Earth and also light the dark side of the moon.

If we don't we will all be dead within 10 years.
 
*facepalm*

The "dark side" of the moon gets light about every 2 weeks and that light lasts for about 2 weeks.
 
sfsuphysics said:
*facepalm*

The "dark side" of the moon gets light about every 2 weeks and that light lasts for about 2 weeks.
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Possibly it's a colloquial expression......

It's easier that saying the "side of the moon no humans have seen from Earth in recorded history due to tidal lock phenomenon". Even SOTMNHHSFEIRHDTTLP is little much.
 
westrock2000 said:
Possibly it's a colloquial expression......

It's easier that saying the "side of the moon no humans have seen from Earth in recorded history due to tidal lock phenomenon". Even SOTMNHHSFEIRHDTTLP is little much.
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Perhaps, but in my experience it's that most people actually thinks one side of the Moon never gets sunlight.

But... easier (and more correct) would be to say "far side of the Moon" :)
 
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