The One-second War (What Time Will You Die?)

Abstract

Thanks to a secretive conspiracy working mostly below the public radar, your time of death may be a minute later than presently expected. But don’t expect to live any longer, unless you happen to be responsible for time synchronization in a large network of computers, in which case this coup will lower your stress level a bit every other year or so. We’re talking about the abolishment of leap seconds, a crude hack added 40 years ago, to paper over the fact that planets make lousy clocks compared with quantum mechanical phenomena.