AnalogSenses

By ÁLVARO SERRANO

Leap Seconds | What If? xkcd →

March 27, 2013 |

This leads to all kinds of little headaches, particularly for programmers. For example, the clock in your smartphone’s GPS is 16 seconds out of sync with the phone’s system clock. This is because the system clock uses Coordinated Universal Time (which has leap seconds), but GPS time doesn’t. They were in sync in January of 1980 and probably never will be again.

Yep, it’s been one of those mornings.