By Rick Moran in PJ Media
It’s time to panic again. Not about
terrorism, or global warming, or Katy Perry performing during halftime of the
Super Bowl.
Panic will grip America on June 30
when we add an extra second to our clocks. This will no doubt confuse our
computers, shut down the electrical grid, cause planes to drop from the sky,
and all that other stuff that happened when the calendar rolled over on January
1, 2000.
Oh, wait…
Actually, the concerns — some of
them — are justified. This isn’t the first time we’ve added a second so that
atomic clocks can be in sync with the earth’s rotation. When it happened in
2012, parts of the internet crashed and several prominent websites went down.
Are we any better prepared this time?
Gizmodo explains the computer
problems: “It mostly has to do with NTP, or the Network Time Protocol computers
use to sync with atomic clocks. If a computer sees the same second twice in a
row, it logically thinks something went very wrong. There are fixes to this,
but they’ve obviously not been implemented across the board.”
There are fears it might happen
again this year.
That’s part of the reason why
there’s been lobbying, especially from officials in the U.S., to do away with
the extra second. The New York Times reports: “Britain, along with Canada and
China, would like to keep the current keeping system, arguing that, in the 40
years that leap seconds have been gracefully inserted in our midst … there have
been no problems to speak of, and the worriers have greatly exaggerated the
potential for havoc. Remember Y2K?”
The Times article, though, was
written in January of 2012, when delegates were meeting that year to decide
whether to keep the extra second. This was months before it caused parts of the
Internet to crash.
So yeah, we have to deal with
Earth’s rotation slowing down – but that’s better than having the Earth stop
rotating entirely for a second.
“Yeah, that would be disastrous. …
If you stopped Earth and you weren’t seat belt-buckled to the Earth, you would
fall over and roll 800 mph due east. It would kill everyone on Earth,”
astrophysicist and science commentator Neil deGrasse Tyson said on CNN.
The computer problem with the leap
second is actually getting worse. USA Today explains:
The reset has happened 25 times
since they were introduced in 1972, but the computer problems are getting more
serious as increasing numbers of computers sync up with atomic clocks. Those
computers and servers are then shown the same second twice in a row — throwing
them into a panic.
If a computer is told to do an
operation at the time that is repeated, for instance, the computer is unsure
what to do. Or if an e-mail is received in that moment, it could find its way
in the wrong bit of the server.
Last time, Google anticipated the
problem and built a smart update, which it called “leap smear”. It modified its
servers so that they would add a little bit of extra time every time they were
updated, so that by the time of the leap second they were already caught up
with the new time. It said when it laid out the plan in 2011 that it would use
the same technique in the future, when new leap seconds are announced.
Leap seconds were initially added at
least once a year, but have slowed since 1979. The U.S. wants to get rid of
them entirely, arguing that they cause too much disruption, but others have
opposed the change.
So, no, planes won’t be crashing all
over the world, nor will the electrical grid melt down. At worse, you may lose
an email or two. With my luck, my Word program will go haywire and I’ll lose an
article I would be working on.
Everyone has their own computer hell
to avoid. Here’s hoping you ride through the Leap Second with minimal damage.
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