[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Defense_Coordination...
Even the titles are sci-fi.
The Time Lords are a fictional ancient race of extraterrestrial people in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. In-universe, they hail from the planet Gallifrey and are stated to have invented time travel technology.
Fun fact: leap seconds will stop being a thing soonish. I think they phase out in 2035, with a delay because Russia needed time to update glassnoss satellites.
(Note: on mobile, this is from memory, details need checking ;))
Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea that they should be replaced by 2035. Nobody has agreed how to fix it, and "Just turn them off" isn't technically legal. However, "What if there were Leap hours instead?" is technically legal and of course those hours would happen in the very distant future (likely after our civilisation is gone) so it's functionally identical to "Just turn them off" but without legal problems.
Now, I'm English, and England loves this sort of hack. You may have heard that controversial UK politician Nigel Farage "resigned" as a Westminster MP recently and that's not technically true because you can't resign, historically people hated that job and so you can't resign and we never changed that, but what you can do, and everybody does, is get assigned an "Office of profit" in which legally the King is paying you, an MP can't work for the King so you can't be an MP any more. The "Offices of profit" in question aren't real jobs† and don't pay real money, like this "Leap Hour" they'd be a legal fiction. So everybody says you "resigned" but in fact you legally can't do that...
† I mean, historically they were real jobs that made sense which is why the King paid somebody to do them, but England is very, very old so they haven't made sense for centuries and serve only as a legal fiction today.
A frightening fact, the 2011 magnitude 9.0 Tohoku Earthquake shifted the position of the Earth's figure axis about 17 centimeters, making days about 1.8 microseconds shorter.
GLONASS maybe? or really glasnost era satellites?
Pandemic -> more people working from home -> less people in tall office buildings -> faster rotation (like a skater pulling in their arms).
Probably not remotely true but it would be funny.
My best guess would be it's somehow related to water distribution? More water going into the atmosphere? Glaciers growing (unlikely)? Did multiple huge water reservoirs go into service and get filled up over the summer months?
"Because the Earth's rotational speed varies in response to climatic and geological events, UTC leap seconds are irregularly spaced and not precisely predictable."
Earths rotation has been unusually fast lately. So there is not enough drift to warrant a leap second.
(oh and it wouldn't be strong enough to affect the Earth's rotation)
They should live in the same abstraction layer that does leap days and daylight savings: the time zones.
The point is that it's weird that we handle a day every 4 years off in a different way to a couple of second being off.
The notable differences are that
1) the leap second happens at the same time globally (23:59:60 UTC), while leap days start at 00:00 local time
2) leap seconds happen at irregular intervals
3) leap seconds are nearly universally implemented wrong, because the ability to show :60 on a second display for for one second at most twice per year is just not worth the implementation complexity
You could argue about 1, but the alternative would lead to much more complicated timezone math (time zones can be an additional one second apart from each other depending on whether the leap second is already applied) for very limited benefit. Number 2 seems unavoidable, and 3 is entirely unintended, just the way things have worked out in real life
>
> from 2017 January 1, 0h UTC, until further notice : UTC-TAI = -37s
This means the atomic clock is behind the solar clock by 37 seconds? I also don’t understand the reference to 2017.
If anything, it's the other way around.
A UTC day is defined as exactly 86400 SI seconds. But an actual mean solar day is a few milliseconds longer (although the difference is not constant due to irregularities in the Earth's rotation--but the average difference is expected to slowly increase over time). SI seconds are counted by atomic clocks, so UTC advances its day by one every 86400 atomic clock seconds.
But a solar clock that advances its day by one every time the mean sun reaches noon (it has to be the mean sun because the rate at which the actual sun moves across the sky varies over the course of a year, we need to look at the average) will advance its day a few milliseconds later than UTC does. Or, to put it another way, each time period that the solar clock says is exactly 86400 seconds, is a few milliseconds longer according to the atomic clock.
As this happens day after day, the difference accumulates, and when it gets close to being a full second, a leap second gets inserted into UTC, so that one of its days is 86401 seconds long instead of 86400. The reason for this is that UTC is not just counting atomic clock time; it also has to stay in sync with where the sun is in the sky since so many human activities are tied to that. And we humans have defined "in sync with the sun" to be "within a second of the average sun". In other words, we want UTC noon to be within a second of mean solar noon on the prime meridian.
So the 37 seconds is how far mean solar noon would be behind UTC noon, if we didn't use leap seconds--at UTC noon, the mean sun would be 37 seconds short of actually crossing the prime meridian in the sky.
Why?
If I travel 1 mile east or west of the prime meridian, my solar noon now comes 2-3 seconds earlier/later. It's nearly impossible to have your local time match your local solar noon. For most of the population, solar noon is, on average, 30 minutes off of 12:00 noon.
Plus, solar noon varies from day to day by 10-20 seconds. Check the charts out. https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/new-york
My guess is that is when they last changed the offset, so the -37s has been in effect since then.
Is it a headache or a non-issue
Some rare systems use monotonic oscillator seconds and ignore the earth rotation second, but if you ever have to translate those to real time, you get an accumulating disaster over time and it’s generally regarded as not a good idea.
I believe in the US this error correction has been discontinued in the East and in Texas, but is still done in the West for some kind of non-clock "inadvertent interchange" reasons I don't understand.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Earth_Rotation_a...
we were all waiting for the negative leap second to finally happen - but cowards got too afraid
Meanwhile....
International timekeepers to vote on changing the leap second to a leap hour
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/international-tim... (https://archive.ph/GnQUj https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842329)
In practice it will never affect anyone because it's a legal fiction, but even if you pretend to believe we would actually introduce this "leap hour" it would be in the distant future long after we're all dead and if there are still humans who have any idea the year 2026 happened they're not sure which of Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Tony Stark and John McClane were real people.
Edited to add:
This is such a ridiculously long time frame that they might not be sure whether we were worried about climate change, for them that's either a disaster they survived (and maybe most didn't) or it's a weird blip in their historical charts which they struggle to explain. Did our civilisation do something very, very stupid? There is a flammable gas deep underground, did we set fire to it because we were crazy? Why the hell would we have done that? There are signs we deliberately set fire to the coal which is a toxic rock also found underground? That would explain the global climate going nuts. Maybe it was a ritual or something. Ancient people are mad.