Now that we’ve abolished leap seconds, and won’t tweak standard time to match the rotation of the Earth until the discrepancy reaches 1 hour, we should establish a generation-spanning secret society that shuffles objects around to make Earth’s spin conform to atomic time instead.
@gregeganSF
Like the balancing monks.
@Steveg58 I had to look that up, but I should have guessed that either Terry Pratchett or Neal Stephenson would have come up with a similar proposal at some point.
Oct 16, 2026, 3:05 PMTo be fair, the Discworld is a bit easier to balance.
Oct 16, 2026, 12:41 PM@gregeganSF the "Knights Timeplars" perhaps?
Oct 16, 2026, 12:55 PMI'm pretty sure glacier melt, rising sea levels, and increased moisture content in the atmosphere were initiated exactly for that purpose. Otherwise global warming would be an amazingly idiotic thing to accept as a society, right?
@gregeganSF
I'm in charge of moving the cats.
@squishberry @gregeganSF Nono - that's impossible.
Very true: that IS impossible. Haven't you seen the "herding cats" commercial? 😺
Oct 16, 2026, 1:07 PM@gregeganSF Adjustment Team by PKD?
@gregeganSF I seem to be the first to reply with https://xkcd.com/162/
@gregeganSF That will definitely be easier than fixing the problem of discontinuous UTC when the 3600 are exceeded and everyone who has forgotten that ancient contract struggles to fix what people couldn't get right thousands of years ago.
Oct 16, 2026, 3:08 PM@gregeganSF haha. It's a carefully plotted sequence of tungsten orders on AliExpress. And returns.
Oct 16, 2026, 3:59 PM@gregeganSF Well,we already have fairly large tidal power plants. If we feed them energy, we could speed up or slow down earth as much as we wanted to.
@gregeganSF
Bong hits 4 secret object-shuffling societies.
@gregeganSF Maybe that's what menhirs are for?
Oct 16, 2026, 6:17 PMLet the Earth Rotation Service live up to its name.
@gregeganSF Lets install gigantic thrusters on the moon...
@gregeganSF My hot take on this topic is that we should delete the seconds and minutes from all our wall clocks because let’s be honest: they are more trouble than they are worth.
If you need nanosecond precision globally synchronized timestamps, we have TAI for that.
@gregeganSF Isn't that what the International Earth Rotation Society already does (along with push it round) ?
@gregeganSF Next btw we also have to fix the 2800 problem where the differing calendar systems fall out over a leap year definition.
At that point the revised Julian diverges and it's the more correct one.
@gregeganSF I honestly thought you were going for a Press Secretary joke here.
@gregeganSF count me in.
Oct 17, 2026, 8:47 AM@gregeganSF
Hehe