Just a Leap Second

June 12, 2015

I read Just a Second by David Wolman for Slate a few minute ago. The piece fascinated me. It addresses the interface between NIST-F2, an atomic clock and the most accurate clock ever built by human beings, and where the sun is at any given moment. Bottom line: the effing Earth does not move in synch with 9,192,631,770, which is some number which relates to something having to do with Cesium. (Some Clock might be what you’d expect to see in Charlotte’s web in Mr. Zuckerman’s barn.)

So how do smart people deal with the fact that 9,912,631,770 and the effing Earth are not in synch. Well, they watch the Earth and, “whenever it looks like the

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