Featured Photos


Baseball Hall of Fame - 8/23/11

Featured Video


Avery's QuEST Project - It's Healthy!

House Construction


The Completed Home Renovation


Home Renovation - Complete!


Our House Construction Photoblog

RSS Feed


« | Main | »

Another Mind-bending, Useless Statement about Time

By Brian | March 31, 2009 | Share on Facebook

We’ve all heard or seen statements like this, typically around New Year’s Eve, when the almighty “they” decide we need a leap second:

One second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. However, Earth’s rotation isn’t perfectly reliable. Tidal friction from the sun and moon slows our planet and increases the length of a day by 3 milli­seconds per century.

Here’s the mind-bending part:

This means that in the time of the dinosaurs, the day was just 23 hours long.

I never thought about it that way…

(Source)

Topics: Random Acts of Blogging | 4 Comments »

4 Responses to “Another Mind-bending, Useless Statement about Time”

  1. Konstantin says at March 31st, 2009 at 2:24 pm :
    Did the dinosaurs have a shorter work week then? Longer weekend?

  2. Brian says at March 31st, 2009 at 3:57 pm :
    Sounds like they had shorter work weeks and shorter weekends.

    Not only that, turns out they were all in the oil business…

  3. Ilya says at April 1st, 2009 at 4:45 am :
    I wonder how long – if at all – the human body would need to adapt its internal clock to the shorter cycle. Could be a real issue for a time traveler…

  4. Jeff Porten says at April 2nd, 2009 at 10:59 pm :
    Ilya — about two weeks. Stick people into an artificial day/night cycle and their circadian cycle will adapt in a few days provided they get a strong dose of sunlight daily. There’s research indicating that the natural human diurnal cycle can vary by wide amounts without much problem, provided you don’t have rapid shifts from one to the other. That’s the part that makes jet lag difficult.

Comments

Comments will be sent to the moderation queue.