… but it bothers a geek like me. Yeah, another leap second story. I suspect these will propagate, but like a game of “whisper” the errors will compound. Three…Two…One…One…Happy New Year!

They mention THE atomic clock (ha! there are many atomic clocks) and cesium clock/standard, but the picture is of a mercury ion clock. Not that anyone else would notice. Then there’s the mortal sin of the US Naval Observatory hyperlink going to the NIST cesium fountain wikipedia entry. (Don’t get me wrong — the folks at NIST do fantastic things and I have a lot of respect for them. And they’re fun at conferences. But get your links straight)

The blurb about miniature clocks goes to a link talking about optical clocks, which are nowhere near deployment as miniature devices. That’s purely conceptual at this point — full-sized optical lattice devices are cutting-edge at the moment, and require a fair amount of care and feeding. Miniaturization and making them robust enough to be portable, and work as true clocks as opposed to a frequency standard (a true clock runs continuously), is a long way off.