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JimH
 
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Default So what will you do with your......................

........extra second just before midnight on New Years Eve?
=============================================

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=18607

On December 31, 2005 a "leap second" will be added to the world's clocks at
23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This
corresponds to 6:59:59 pm Eastern Standard Time, when the extra second will
be inserted at the U.S. Naval Observatory. This marks the 23rd leap second
to be added to UTC, a uniform time-scale kept by atomic clocks around the
world. Although you normally don't think about it, for most conventional
uses the "civil" time you use is based on UTC. At the U.S. Naval
Observatory, UTC is determined by averaging the time signals from cesium
beam atomic clocks and hydrogen masers (the last being an improvement over
the tried and true cesium clocks for measuring short periods of time).

Man's oldest clock has always been the Earth. We know it's morning when the
Sun rises, noon when the Sun is overhead, and evening when the Sun sets. The
Earth's accuracy as a clock is good to about one thousandth of a second per
day - more than enough accuracy for most people. However, the invention of
"atomic" clocks, which operate by measuring the resonant frequency of a
given atom - (currently Cesium, Hydrogen or Mercury) - greatly increased
that accuracy, and has now led to the capability at the U.S. Naval
Observatory of measuring time to accuracies exceeding a billionth of a
second per day.

==========================================



I guess my wife gets an extra second of a kiss from me. ;-)


 
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