Celebrate Quickly

Just so we’re all on the same page, there will be no Leap Second adjustment today

It's my favorite one-second-long holiday of the year!  I'm sad now.  

Time is confusing.  First of all, They Are A-Changin', and secondly, there are too many of them.  By the time you factor in all of the different time zones and various Daylight Savings Times and figure out exactly how all of that meshes with Mean Solar Time, you're ready for the nuthouse.  Then you throw a further monkey wrench into the works by introducing Coordinated Universal Time, which is based on more precise atomic clocks.  If that weren't bad enough, Coordinated Universal Time is abbreviated UTC, as you might not expect.  You see that and you think it must be based on the title in a foreign language...and you'd be 100% wrong.  The French title for UTC is Temps Universel Coordonné.  I'm not making this up when I say that calling it UTC is simply a compromise between CUT and TUC.  I told you this stuff is confusing, right?

Well anyway, every now and again, to accommodate imperceptible changes in the Earth's rotational speed, UTC has to be adjusted, by a single second at a time.  These changes are announced only 6 months in advance due to irregularities in Solar position and the rotation speed.  It's a very precise science, and there are official emails send out.  They're Awesome. 

Leap Seconds are always added one second before midnight on June 30th and/or December 31st.  That would be today, if it were going to happen, which would throw off your alarm clocks by a second if you weren't aware and made the appropriate adjustment yourself.  Fortunately for us all, there is no need today, since it has been decided that there will be no Leap Second today.  We'll look for it again in December.