I use a sundial. Once set it's always right.

So does that mean when the do the "countdown to midnight" it should be...

10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2..1...1... Midnight?

It will be a New Year for the Pedants to have fun. :-)

>So does that mean when the do the "countdown to midnight" it should be...

>10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2..1...1... Midnight?

No ... but you'll have to start counting down at 23:59:51

It's the one with the stopwatch in the pocket

However how does one translate a yoctosecond into the El Reg standard of weights and measures?? If there isn't one I suggest it be equivalent to the amount of time between someone completing a windows install and finding the computer has been compromised. Or perhaps the time between the posting of a "Fail and you" article and someone commenting on Ted's language.

Everybody always said that Bush would try to find some way to extend his presidency, and now it's happened! Stock up on shotguns and hard liquor!

I thought the element was "Caesium". A small, but important difference. Or is this another "Americanisation", like "aluminum" instead of "aluminium"?

At ten-to-the-minus-two-dozen each, you'll have rather a lot more than just several million yoctoseconds to add to your New Year's Eve bash.

...and just why is there not time unit on the highly useful

http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html

page? Eh? Eh? If New York can have the "New York Second" (the time it takes for the taxi driver behind you to blow his horn after the traffic light turns green) why not an "El Reg Jiffy"? The Windows-installation-completion to first-compromise will do nicely. How about a compo for this Friday?

And nothing to do with this comic - http://www.xkcd.com/162/ - at all...?

Can't we tag the leap second onto the start of 2009 instead? 2008 has been a bitch of a year, so why prolong it?

erm whats the point of keeping UTC if it needs to be paused so that UT1 can keep up? Why not just use UT1 instead?

My 9-year-old son will be delighted to see yoctoseconds mentioned. He recently did a project for school involving SI notations, and has been measuring time in yoctoseconds ever since. I'm getting quite good at counting in quintillions as a result :-)

You forgot to account for continental drift. That's 5 cm a year on average!

Ok that one had me in tears

My son just pointed out that I would be counting in septillions, not quintillions...

Shown up by a 9 year old... <hangs head in shame>

"Can't we tag the leap second onto the start of 2009 instead? 2008 has been a bitch of a year, so why prolong it?"

I'd say getting rid of the terrorist in the White House is a good thing.

but

"The occasional chrono-adjustment is meant to keep the uniform time kept by atomic clocks since 1972 less than 0.9 seconds within the time-scale measured by the Earth's rotation around its axis."

isn't quite how I would have put it :-)

My watch will be fast again..... And every time they insert another of those leap events, it brings my date and time of death forward.... Life's short enough already, why don't these guys think?

Time to leave, methinks

Coat, cos I don' want to listen to guys who don't get the joke trying to explain it to me...

Leap seconds are under threat and may be abolished in future years, allowing UTC shown by your clock to drift away from UT which the the time of the day according to where the sun is over the future centuries.

This is being proposed because the earth's rotation is slowing, so soon we'll need one leap second a year, and next century we will need 2 leap seconds a year, later still one a month and eventually one a day. Even in the sort term that means too many changes to clocks in precision systems such as GPS.

However I see it as being a victory for numbers and a defeat for humans. In the past we defined units from practical observations such as a second being 1/86400th of a day, now it is based caesum atoms and cant be changed to reflect the world as we find it.

Anyone running a NTP (Network Time Protocol) client which logs the system clock corrections made will be able to see the evidence of the extra 1 second adjustment.

So what happens when you phone the speaking clock?

"At the third beep the time will be 23:59:60, beep, beep, beep"

or

"At the third beep, the time will be nearly 00:00, beep, beep, beep"

or

"At the fourth beep, the time will be 00:00, ....."

Paris ? She'll need to take her Gucci watch to get fixed.

Surely our wanton mistreatment of the environ is slowing the roll of our big ball 'o blue.

Save the planet - it's your duty. For the children!

Lisbon (in Portugal) is in the same time zone as London (in England)

referred to as UTC, when:

C oordinated

UN iversal

T ime

easily offends...