[OESY]

A slowing earth? Secret seconds (no, not RFK)? Longer days? Global warming? Melting ice caps? Drowning cities? Freezing temperatures?

This is outrageous! It's Mother Nature gone wild. There was no consultation! Inadequate documentation. Bush is to blame.

We're gonna take this message to The Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Phobos, Deimos, Jupiter, Metis, Adrastea, Amalthea, Thebe, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Leda, Himalia, Lysithea, Elara, Ananke, Carme, Pasiphae, Sinope, Saturn, Pan, Atlas, Prometheus, Pandora, Epimetheus, Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Telesto, Calypso, Dione, Helene, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe, Uranus, Cordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Portia, Rosalind, Belinda, Puck, Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon, Caliban, Sycorax, Prospero, Setebos, Stephano, Trinculo, Neptune, Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Galatea, Larissa, Proteus, Triton, Nereid, Pluto, Charon, Comet Halley, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, The Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud, Sedna, 951 Gaspra, 243 Ida, 253 Mathilde, 433 Eros and Other Solar Systems. Yeeeeeaaaaaarrrrrrrhhhhhhhh!

[Red Badger]

I thought Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was destroyed........

[JustAnotherOkie]

Does anyone really know what time it is?

[Willie Green]

according to a U.S. government proposal that businesses favor,

So the Anointed One wants to defy the universal laws of physics to pander to the international banking community?
What a pathetic nincompoop!!!
Dubya is no different than Algore when it comes to Big Government junk science.

[Captain Rhino]

Can't belive it hasn't been posted yet. Terrible tension building...don't know if I can resist...okay, I'll say it:

IT'S ALL BUSH'S FAULT!!

Aaahh...I feel better.

[babyface00]

I don't have a WSJ subscription, so maybe this is explained in the article...

What do they mean by "The plan would simplify the world's timekeeping by making each day last exactly 24 hours".

Does this mean we're going to take the current rotation of the earth around its axis, and divide it by 24 to get hours, which will change our definitions of minutes, seconds, etc?

If we do that, won't we have to keep re-evaluating our time as the Earth slows down?

Or, are they going to take the Earth's rotation around the sun as a year, and calculate back from there, which would make midnight creap backwards ever so slowly over the years away from the actual midnight based on the earth's rotation around its axis?

[xp38]

This is not an issue I will lose a second of sleep over.

[Plutarch]

In 1997, the Russian global positioning system, known as Glonass, was broken for 20 hours after a transmission to the country's satellites to add a leap second went awry.

A Russian military system went awry? Noooo way.

[ImaGraftedBranch]

Hmmm.... "He'll think to change times and laws...."

Sounds like I've read that somewhere.....OH YEAH....Revelation.

[Rocket1968]

I think you left out Uranus. :)

[tutstar]

PING

[IYAAYAS]

Back in the day when I worked at a LORAN-c master control station it was always great fun to do time shifts. We would have to "move" ten LORAN stations a few thousand microseconds using 300baud modems, and then try to find the signal again on 20 receivers spread all over North America. Everything would then need to be realigned into a 20 nanosecond window. We would then spend the rest of the day fielding phone calls from irate fishermen. One time we needed to take a master transmitter down for maintenance, long distance phone service went down for a large part of the country. Turns out AT+T was using the signal as a sync for all of their equipment...DOH.

[r9etb]

And in 2003, a leap-second bug made GPS receivers from Motorola Inc. briefly show customers the time as half past 62 o'clock.

This is the real issue -- there is LOTS of stuff that uses GPS as its time source, cell phone systems being one example, and lots of finance/money transfer applications as well.

The GPS system uses "GPS Time," which is anchored back on 1/6/1986. No leap seconds are added to GPS time ... it simply diverges from UTC.

It causes no problems for anybody. If you're a bank, you don't need to account for leap seconds -- a big plus. If you're a person, you'll never, ever notice. And if you're an astronomer, all you have to know is the conversion between GPS and Terrestrial Dynamical Time, which takes into account all sorts of things besides leap seconds.

Much ado about nothing.

[wideminded]

That graph makes it look like the days are getting shorter, not longer since 1900.

[BradyLS]

You know, when C'thulhu awakes from slumber in R'lyeh and takes over the world, none of this crap is gonna matter.

;-) :-D