The International Earth Rotation Service will add a leap second on June 30 to sync up the atomic clock time to Earth’s rotational time.
And that is supposedly now going to cause a problem for the internet..
Here is a good summation of the summer’s upcoming computer problems from THE VERGE
Of course, not every website or company has the sort of engineering resources needed to implement something like a “leap smear,” and when June 30th rolls around in the summer, you can expect to see the odd outage or two. Beyond clever engineering though, there’s not much to be done. As The Telegraph reports, there are some factions in the US that would like to drop the leap second altogether, but doing so would mean unmooring our concept of time from one of the most fundamental timescales, the solar day, and setting civil time on a path forever diverging from time as measured by our planet. Would it be worth the trouble? We’ll get another chance to find out on June 30th.
Just something else to worry about.
As far as why the second is being added: The earth’s rotation has slowed..
While I have seen a multitude of theories as to why, let’s not forget the major earthquakes of the past ten years–and even how some speculated after the Japan quake in ‘11 that it caused an earth wobble and affected time itself.
Cue the DON’T HUG ME I’M SCARED VIDEO.
