Which of the following organizations are real?

A, Cat Video Studies Club

B, International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service

C, The Association of Psychiatric Assistants of Latvia
If you chose ‘B’ you’re correct. Now think of what it would be like to measure the Earth’s rotation. Do we pay people to do that? How long is their tape measure? More importantly, what does it actually mean to the average person?

Answer: Nothing, but the Earth seems to be slowing down due to the Moon’s orbit getting bigger. This exerts a transfer of Earth’s rotational momentum to the Moon’s orbital momentum and the tidal friction slows the Earth’s rotation. Either that or some of you have been dragging your feet. Don’t blame the Earth for slowing down. If you were 4 billion years old, you’d slow down too.

It will not mean the ‘end of the world’. The end of the world as we know it will occur when the Sun’s hydrogen is gone and it expands into a red giant engulfing the solar system or Justin Bieber gets elected to the Senate.

Think about that for a moment. Have you stopped thinking? Have you breached the outer limits of your attention span?

We could explain how that works in scientific terms but your head would explode and we don’t need the liability. Our insurance covers that particular issue but there would be a large deductible.

The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) announced that June 30 will be one whole second longer.

Does that mean we get an extra second (Free second) to do with whatever we want? YES!

That’s fine for us, but our computers may get confused and wreak havoc on online servers. The Paris based group said that it plans to add a “leap second,” or extra second, in order to sync atomic clock time to the Earth’s rotational time.

Who knew that ‘tidal friction’ would lead to computers getting confused and really, isn’t that better than Justin Bieber running for the Senate?