Sentences with phrase «leap seconds»

Felicitas Arias of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures suggests we stop adding leap seconds to coordinated universal time...

UTC — the reference against which international time zones are set — is calculated by averaging signals from around 400 atomic clocks, with leap seconds added to stop UTC drifting away from solar time at a rate of about one minute every 90 years.

The US Global Positioning System ignores leap seconds for just this reason, and Russia's GLONASS system has had problems in the past incorporating the leap.

Abolishing leap seconds only defers any problems, he adds.

Najarian pointed out some of the technical headaches that leap seconds cause: they can not be preprogrammed into software, for example, because they are typically announced only six months in advance by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service in Frankfurt, Germany.

Still, some countries — principally China, Canada and the United Kingdom — want to keep leap seconds to maintain the link with solar time, in part for philosophical reasons.

Abandoning leap seconds, for example, would create chaos for world governments, because most national legal codes and international treaties are based on civil time.

«But we [astronomers] would have to rewrite the software that points many of our telescopes within five years of discontinuing leap seconds.»

But most astronomers like leap seconds.

If leap seconds were as predictable as leap days, they wouldn't be so troublesome to computer programmers.

«In about 50 years we will be putting in leap seconds at the rate of a couple a year,» he says.

We all know that some time a while back Julian did something to Gregory (or vice versa) and now we have our only slightly cranky leap year thing, with the odd leap second thrown in to make the Taylorites happy.

This month the International Telecommunication Union will consider a proposal to abolish leap seconds.

So, beginning in 1972, another international body agreed to add leap seconds to atomic time to create a civil timescale that was both uniform and consonant with day length.

That's thanks to the «leap second,» which gets added on to a day every now and again to compensate for a constant...

To avoid the safety hazards associated with losing crucial time - keeping signals, most satellite navigation systems already maintain their own internal clocks, and they don't use the leap second.

Delegates from about 150 countries discussed whether to stop adding a second — called a leap second — to calendars every year or so, a practice that keeps atomic clocks in step with Earth's rotation and the position of the Sun in the sky.

Arias, who co-organized that meeting, argues that leap seconds are obsolete now that global navigation systems, which set their own internal timescales, have replaced solar time for navigation and precision scientific measurements such as the motion of tectonic plates and how Earth's mass warps space - time.

But «leap seconds are a nuisance», says Elisa Felicitas Arias, the director of the Time Department at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Sèvres, France.

At issue is whether to abolish the «leap second» — the extra second added every year or so to keep UTC in step with Earth's slightly unpredictable orbit.

Peter Whibberley, a physicist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, UK, says that despite ten years of debate, «there's no convincing evidence that anything serious would happen if you made a mistake introducing a leap second into a system».

Felicitas Arias of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures suggests we stop adding leap seconds to coordinated universal time (UTC), which is based on atomic clocks, to compensate for its drift from astronomical time, mainly on the grounds that telecommunications systems do not work well with leap seconds (17 December 2011, p 27).

There's plenty of time to adjust your calendars: «If the excess length of day continues to be about 1.2 milliseconds, another leap second won't be needed for about three years,» Gross wrote in an e-mail.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., occasionally adds a «leap second» to the atomic clocks used to standardize time.

11 To keep this time in sync with Earth's slowing rotation, a «leap second» must be added every few years, most recently this past New Year's Eve.

«In 1972 the leap second was considered a step forward,» says astronomer Dennis McCarthy, who runs the Washington - based time directorate for the International Earth Rotation Service.

A leap second may have caused the Russian satellite navigation system to crash for hours, and critics claim the added instants could cause commercial airliners to crash as well.

The experts are arguing about the future of the leap second, an extra second added to the world's clocks every year or so to keep the artificial constructs of hours and minutes in lockstep with the actual length of the day.

«People ask us why we can't just tell them when the leap seconds are going to be,» says McCarthy.

Foes of the leap second fear that growing discrepancies between atomic time and civil time could sabotage military operations, disrupt financial markets, disable cellular phones, and even cause midair collisions.

When the International Earth Rotation Service calls for it, timing labs in all time zones add a leap second just before midnight in Greenwich, England.

Each carries four ultra-precise clocks synchronized to GPS time — which is, essentially, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) without the leap seconds.

Steve Allen of the Lick Observatory in California has provided an excellent comprehensive resource for finding out more about the leap second.

If clock time gets more than about 0.4 seconds out of step with astronomical time then the Earth Orientation Center of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) based in the Paris Observatory announce a leap second needs to be inserted so that the two time scales always agree to better than one second.

In case you missed it, June was extended by an extra second (the «leap second») and if that doesn't seem like much, here is something interesting to watch that showcases some spectacular leaps that can happen in much less than a second.

Finally, we close out with investor chatter on the forums and an interesting video in honour of the leap second that made July that much later this year.

In addition, as of 3:20 pm eastern (give or take a leap second), I can't seem to find either the Arrival or Arrival Plus on the page with all of Barclaycard's products.