Neil deGrasse Tyson: The last Leap Second added was June 30, 2012....

[Playinghardball]

Neil deGrasse Tyson ?@neiltyson · Jun 28
The last Leap Second added was June 30, 2012. Here’s what it looked like from the Eastern Time Zone.

[Electric Monk]

1. What did you do with your extra second? I saw a video of an upside down sloth making a weird sound.

http://spendyourleapsecondhere.com/

[HFRN]

2. they have to keep adding these leap seconds because of global slowing nt

[dhill926]

3. I so wasted that second...

damn....

[Motown_Johnny]

4. So it wasn't accurate to within 0.2 seconds.

False advertising.

[Thor_MN]

5. How so?

[Motown_Johnny]

6. If they needed to add a full second

then it couldn't be accurate within 1/5th of that amount of time.

It was either off by ~0.8 or it is now off by ~0.8 seconds.



Except of course that the time is whatever the people in charge of keeping time say it is. My post was a bit of a joke. I suppose if you are using the earth's rotation as the basis, then it must have been off by ~0.8 seconds.

[Thor_MN]

7. If the screen shots are real, they are showing the addtion of a second

normally the clock goes from 59 seconds to 0 seconds of the next minute. In other words, seconds are zero ordered, the first second is :00, the sixtieth is :59. They show the clock going from :59 to :60 to :00. The :60 is the sixty-first second in that minute.

How is that not accurate to within 0.2 seconds? Of course, it could have been recorded at any time and not been accurate at all, but if the screen shots are real, there's absolutely nothing in them to suggest they are not accurate to 0.2 seconds.

Are you maybe mistaking the 19:59:59 as 19 minutes 59 seconds and 59 hundredths, instead of 19 hours (7 PM) 59 minutes and 59 seconds?

[Motown_Johnny]

8. I understand that

I am saying that if you add a full second then at some point it could not possibly be accurate to within 0.2 seconds.

If it needed a full second to be accurate again, then it must have been off by 0.8 seconds.

Simple math. Nothing more.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

9. it was 0.2 seconds from official time...

the official time clocked from :59 to :60 to :00... so yes, it was consistently accurate. if there had been no :60 then your argument would hold water, but because there WAS a :60 the clock was accurate to within 0.2 seconds of that time.

sP

[Motown_Johnny]

10. then 2 seconds before that it was off

or more accurately, the entire method we use to keep time was off

[ProdigalJunkMail]

11. nevermind... you don't get it... n/t

[Motown_Johnny]

12. one of us doesn't

The entire concept of how we keep time is arbitrary.

My point is that if it needed an entire second added to be made accurate then it must have been off by a second.

I know that if you adhere simply to the arbitrary method by which we keep time, then it was accurate. But if you grasp that the way we keep time is to keep track of the motion of our planet, then it was off. Yes, even though it is our planet which slowed slightly and therefore required the addition of the leap second.

My post was "tongue in cheek". If you are completely literal about it then you missed my point.

[Thor_MN]

13. That one of us would be you.

You are interchangeably using official time and astronomical time.

[Motown_Johnny]

16. Yep.. not a serious post. As I said.

Which is why the clock must have been off since the two were not in agreement.

[Thor_MN]

17. Problem is you don't seem to understand which clock you are talking about

at any given point in time. The clocks in the screen captures (assuming that they were not faked) were always within 0.2 seconds of official time. The leap second was to bring official time back in sync with astronomical time which is a different clock.

If you were trying to be humorous, you weren't.

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. The point is that we haven't used the earth's rotation for several decades, since it's inconsistent

It varies more than atomic clocks do, and seconds have been defined, again for several decades, based on atomic phenomena rather than astronomical observation. The current system is to allow these minutes of '60 seconds past, and then 0', when they are needed to move the global time so that it gives the astronomical time at Greenwich, for, say, midnight, to the correct nearest second.

There is a proposal to give up these leap seconds, in which case astronomical time would gradually drift from the official time - meaning sunrise and sunset would gradually drift away from the times each location currently has for them.

[AngryAmish]

15. Wow

?03d4a8