Warner Losh wrote:
> Tom Van Baak wrote:
>
>> Although on average LOD is more than 86400 s by a few milliseconds, in the
>> past fifty years about 3% of the days have been shorter than 86400 s. In the
>> past decade alone the figure is 14% (the earth has sped up quite a bit the
>> past decade). You can imagine then that some days must be rather close to no
>> error.
>>
>> Five days were within 1 microsecond and the record goes to November 29, 2004
>> which was just 200 nanoseconds shy of a perfect 86400 second day.
>
> How much better would be if we'd adapted a mean solar second of 1900 instead
> of 1820 which we wound up with?
See Steve's plot:
http://ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/lod.pdf
or the top plot of http://ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/amsci.html, zoomed to
recent decades.
The Earth would be deemed fast by about 4 ms / days (five millionths of a
percent if I've got the decimal right).
What is "better" or "perfect" here is a matter of debate.
Rob
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