Internet Melts Down As Extra Second Is Added To 6/30/15

Time. It measures everything we do in every day we spend, while we work and rush about going to our jobs,

planning our daily schedules, everything we do is based on time and everything we don't do. Tonight, June 30th becomes the longest day of 2015, but only by a second. When the clock gets to 11:59:59 standard time or 23:59:59 military time, the next second is supposed to be 00:00:00, but tonight it will go further, clocks will read 11:59:60 or 23:59:60 before zeroing out.

Its called a Leap Second, and they have done it 25 times since 1972. Its not like Leap Year where we get a whole new day to add to a year because we know that will happen from now and into the future because they are set. A Leap Second is very unpredictable, they are announced 6 months in advance. But how is this determined in the first place?

Time is fictional, it doesn't really exist. It is simply the human way of measuring how long the earth takes to spin one time (hours, minutes, seconds) and how long it takes for the earth to travel one orbit around the sun (days, weeks, months), and they are made to work together. So in a manner of speaking Time is nothing more than a flowchart. That being said, according to time, in theory, it takes the Earth 86,400 seconds to rotate one time. In practice its taking 86,400.002 seconds, which means the Earth is slowing down its rotation. It fluctuates regularly which is why we add the second.

In 1967 when clocks went atomic, they have monitored more closely the Earths rotation, and because of this time gap the Leap Second was implemented. As humans we can ignore it and some probably will, but computers on the other hand can and have had issues in the past. The U.S. Stock markets are closing late night trading down early, and more are recalibrating their clocks ahead of time. Google fixed the problem by adding the extra second by what they call a “Time Smear”, where the extra second is broken up and added to every second in the 86,400 seconds of the day, just to name a few. The last time a second was added was 2012, many websites had glitches and it may happen again if they aren't prepared.

But enough of the facts. What will you do with your extra second? How many different things can be done with one second? For a Time-Lord like The Doctor in Doctor Who, or a master of time like Hiro in The Heroes, one second could be an eternity, but for us regular humans, how much of a difference will it make? Will your second be Epic? Or will you be asleep? Only time will tell.