Interesting Links for 03-07-2024

[andrewducker]

1. JK Rowling asks for examples of her spreading hate. Goes oddly quiet when presented with a list

(tags:jkrowling bigotry transgender LGBT )

2. I am shocked to discover that anti-trans Telegraph writer Nina Power, who regularly defended JK Rowling, turns out to be a literal Neo-Nazi

(tags:nazis jkrowling transgender lgbt bigotry telegraph OhForFucksSake )

3. All I want for Christmas is a negative leap second

(tags:time space earth )

4. Study finds hybrid work benefits companies and employees

(tags:work office homes )

5. Sandman casting announcement. Including characters from Season of Mists, A Game Of You, a couple of one-shots, and (surprisingly) Brief Lives.

I didn't think we'd be seeing Jack Gleeson come back to acting!
(tags:sandman acting )

Comments

leap seconds

[fanf]

My IERS Bulletin A tracker currently estimates the next leap second might be negative happen in 2036-2041, which is after abolition. At the start of this year the earl was spinning about 50us fast; it's currently 100us fast. It fluctuates a lot so changes on the timescale of months don't mean much.

He links to Facebook as an example of who is campaigning against leap seconds, but I think more significant is that (over the last couple of decades) much of the pressure for abolition has come from places like NIST, USNO, BIPM, and the IERS themselves.

Leap minutes are a red herring. They will never happen, but they are mentioned as a sop for the mierenneuken who can't abide the prospect of UTC being purely atomic. What's much more likely is delaying it until a leap hour is needed, and applying it using the time zone mechanism. If we continue using leap seconds, they will (over the centuries) come faster and faster until they are practically every month and become impossible to manage ... which is about the time when a leap hour is needed if leap seconds are abolished. However, it's likely that DST will also be abolished, and time zones will be ossified, so it will be hard to use them to apply a leap hour. And the offset between 12:00 and solar noon will drift so gradually that I doubt anyone will want to resynchronize noon.

Also, being pedantic, the change in speed of the earth happened in 2020, which is when the gradient of the UT1-UTC trend line changed from downwards to upwards, and something weird happened to the IERS dX and dY charts https://datacenter.iers.org/plots.php?id=6

Re: leap seconds

[andrewducker]

How long will it be until we need a leap hour?

Re: leap seconds

[fanf]

About 1000 years ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: leap seconds

[andrewducker]

I may be willing to make it Future Uploaded Andy's problem.

Re: leap seconds

[bens_dad]

?

We can only have 2000 leap seconds in 1000 years. That sounds like the leap second will fail on that time scale, unless we add them at other times than June and December.

[simont]

#5: "Indya Moore [...] plays Wanda, a professional driver and security agent for an exclusive travel firm. Wanda proves herself to be an indispensable guide on an Endless road trip to the waking world."

That's confusing! The descriptions of the character and plot role match Ruby from Brief Lives. But "Wanda" is the name of a completely different character – the trans woman in A Game of You.

If this indicates that they're planning to merge the two characters, that will be a plotting challenge to say the least.

[andrewducker]

I think that someone's just fucked up.

[calimac]

Further confusing because up in the narrative text they quote Gaiman describing the Wanda who's in Game of You. And the cast list includes no other characters from Game of You, so wtf is going on here?

[andrewducker]

Someone at Netflix fucking up, I expect.