Positive Leap Second - INTERNATIONAL EARTH ROTATION AND REFERENCE SYSTEMS SERVICE

[Maynard]

How will you spend your leap second?

UTC TIME STEP -- on the 1st of July 2012

To authorities responsible for the measurement and distribution of time. A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2012.

The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be:


2012 June 30, 23h 59m 59s
2012 June 30, 23h 59m 60s
2012 July 1, 0h 0m 0s

The difference between UTC and the International Atomic Time TAI is:

from 2009 January 1, 0h UTC, to 2012 July 1 0h UTC : UTC-TAI = - 34s
from 2012 July 1, 0h UTC, until further notice : UTC-TAI = - 35s

Leap seconds can be introduced in UTC at the end of the months of December
or June, depending on the evolution of UT1-TAI. Bulletin C is mailed every
six months, either to announce a time step in UTC or to confirm that there
will be no time step at the next possible date.



Daniel GAMBIS
Head
Earth Orientation Center of IERS
Observatoire de Paris, France

How to Watch a Leap Second

Now that you know what a leap second is, have you wondered if you can see one? Can you hear a leap second? Several of us enjoy capturing leap seconds. You have to be quick; you have to plan ahead. You have only one second to fish and then wait a year or two, or even seven, before your next chance...

[RadicalModerate]

None of this would be a Non-Issue if They hadn't switched from The Cesium Beam Standard Clock to that New-Fangled Other Atomic Clock . . .

(another one of those annoying "time is money" Illuminati distractions . . . sigh)

[Maynard]

Leap Second crashes half the internet

Yesterday’s leap second killed half the Internet, including Pirate Bay, Reddit, LinkedIn, Gawker Media and a host of other sites. Even an airline. Any Linux user processes that depends on kernel threads had a high chance of failing...

[Snowman]

I am curious how may years it would take for this to ever be noticed by people (who's job does not involve some sort of extremely accurate timing), there has only been like 13 corrections in the last twenty years.