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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Google adds more time to 2016

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Google is planning to add one more second, dubbed a leap second, to the clock making 2016 last one second more.

Part of the reason why is because the earth during its rotation has minor “brakes”, and since the world slows by about 2 milliseconds a day, a leap second needs to be added about every 500 days.

Leap seconds allow atomic clocks, which are regulated by the vibrations of an atomic or molecular system, to keep sync with Earth’s orbit.

Since 1972, when the first leap second occurred, 26 tics have been added. The last was June 30, 2015.

Although, the atomic clocks are not built to deliver a 61-second timer.

Could it be that the stories of the millennium bug, ‘Y2K’, are actually coming true?

This is highly unlikely, as it is true that most Google devices we use involve time in their wiring – Gmail, Youtube, Google Maps – google has a way to more or less shade away time over a 20-hour period. So, in retrospect, you will not feel the effects of the added second all at once. Not that you would feel anything being that it is only a second of time.

Technical Lead on Google’s Time Team, Michael Shields said: “No commonly used operating system is able to handle a minute with 61 seconds, and trying to special-case the leap second has caused many problems in the past.

“Instead of adding a single extra second to the end of the day, we’ll run the clocks 0.0014 per cent slower across the ten hours before and ten hours after the leap second, and ‘smear’ the extra second across these twenty hours. For timekeeping purposes, December 31 will seem like any other day.”

Adding a second to the atomic clock could cause systems to fail, however Google is determined to make sure that everything runs smoothly.

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