A quick look at everything that tickled my fancy over the past week:
Earth’s Spin Rate: It’s not just your head that’s spinning faster as you try to keep up with the news cycle. Turns out that the Earth is spinning faster too. A fact that could screw up how long it takes us to complete a day. In fact, we may officially lose a second.
As Forbes puts it:
“That might not seem like a lot, but it has big consequences over time because atomic clocks—which are used in GPS satellites—don’t take into account the Earth’s changing rotation.
If Earth spins faster then it gets to the same position a little earlier. A half-a-millisecond equates to 10-inches or 26 centimetres at the equator. In short, GPS satellites—which already have to be corrected for the effect of Einstein’s general relativity theory (the curve of space and time)—are quickly going to become useless.
There are also potentially confusing consequences for smartphones, computers and communications systems, which synchronize with Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers. Defined as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on January 1, 1970, standard Unix time is not designed to cope with leap seconds, though a ‘drop second’ would be less problematic.”
North Pole Shifting: But the Earth spinning faster isn’t the only change occurring on our planet. The North Pole is also shifting. Racing towards Siberia.
According to Discover Magazine:
“Scientists usually update the position of the magnetic pole every five years. But in 2019, the movement was so fast and unexpected that scientists were forced to issue an extra, irregular update so that navigation devices that rely on it could be corrected.
That raises a significant question. What is causing the magnetic pole to move so quickly? And will it ever return to Canada?
Now we get an answer thanks to the work of Philip Livermore at the University of Leeds in the U.K., and a couple of colleagues, who say the position of the pole is the result of a tug-of-war between two patches of negative magnetic flux sitting below Canada and Siberia. In recent years, the Canadian patch has significantly weakened allowing the Siberian patch to pull the pole in its direction. And they say their model predicts the pole will continue to move towards Siberia by up to 660 kilometers (370 miles) in the next decade.”
Trebek Soundboard: The website Bernie Sits captured the nation’s attention this week for paying homage to bundled up Bernie Sanders but there’s another website currently paying homage to a Canadian hero, Jeopardy host Alex Trebek, that is equally worthy of our attention. Resembling a Jeopardy game board the site, Trebek Affirmations, lets you click on various clues to hear all of Trebek’s patented catchphrases and affirmations. If you miss the beloved icon it’s the perfect way to reminiscence. Or to mess with your co-workers.
Snowflake Camera: Speaking of Canada, famed inventor Nathan Myhrvold recently ventured there to take pictures of snowflakes with a custom camera that he build for that sole purpose.
Boing Boing explains:
“Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO, is also famous for his audacious photography, notably of food. A while ago he got interested in snowflakes, too, and realized that to take high-rez photos of them, you’d have to build a wildly custom rig.
Why? As he told Forbes, part of the problem is they’re tiny — so you need a camera that can adjust in increments of microns — and super fragile: Add the slightest bit of additional heat and they start melting and/or sublimating. So his camera is made of carbon fiber (to prevent micron-level material shrinkage as temperatures shift), uses ultra-high-speed LEDs (which pulse light so briefly it won’t melt the snowflake), and uses artificial sapphire lenses (‘eight times the thermal conductivity of glass’, as Myhrvold notes).”
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