{"id":1184,"date":"2009-01-06T09:30:34","date_gmt":"2009-01-06T14:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=1184"},"modified":"2009-01-06T09:30:34","modified_gmt":"2009-01-06T14:30:34","slug":"time-to-answer-the-wrong-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/1184","title":{"rendered":"Time to Answer the Wrong Question"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2207757\/\">What Do Timekeepers Do?<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>On New Year&#8217;s Eve at 6:59:59 p.m. ET, an &#8220;international consortium of timekeepers&#8221; will add one second to the world&#8217;s clock. How do you get to be an official timekeeper?<\/p>\n<p>Earn a Ph.D. in astronomy and move to France. Tweaks to the official clock are announced by the Earth Orientation Center, a Paris-based subunit of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Well, no.  That&#8217;s how you get to make the decision of when to add a leap second.  But the IERS is not the official timekeeper, that&#8217;s the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bipm.org\/en\/home\/\">BIPM<\/a>, who calculate the atomic time scale TAI and the coordinated universal time scale UTC.  Countries that contribute to the international standard realize their own versions of these time scales.<\/p>\n<p>In the US, there aren&#8217;t a lot of places where you can learn to be a timekeeper.  Contrary to the article&#8217;s suggestion, your best bet is probably a degree in atomic physics or math, depending on whether you want to work on hardware or on the timescale algorithms, and then apply for a job at USNO or NIST.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What Do Timekeepers Do? On New Year&#8217;s Eve at 6:59:59 p.m. ET, an &#8220;international consortium of timekeepers&#8221; will add one second to the world&#8217;s clock. How do you get to be an official timekeeper? Earn a Ph.D. in astronomy and &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/1184\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-time"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}