Tonight is the 27th leap second!

LincLinc OwnerDetroit Icrontian

The modern definition of a second is 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation of a cesium atom jumping between two particular energy states, because that’s how many cycles it took to fill 1/86,400 of what the average day of 1900 was predicted to be in 1895.

The origin of leap seconds, and why they should be abolished

Companies are dealing with the upcoming leap second on June 30 in many different ways. Some US exchanges are delaying the open or advancing the close (paywall) of certain trading markets as a precaution, so that the leap second doesn’t fall during trading hours. Amazon and Google are “smearing” the application of the leap second, which means that instead of inserting an extra second on their servers’ clocks between 23:59:59 UTC and 00:00:00 UTC they’ll make the seconds leading up to midnight UTC slightly longer, so that the leap second pushes their clocks back into synchronization with UTC.

At press time it was reported that Icrontic will be entirely ignoring the extra second.

StrikesUPSLynx

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