Shorter Days? (8.8 Chile Earthquake)

[Kirby]

So some guy in NASA says our days have gotten shorter

How upset are YOU now that you will be missing an extra millisecond out of your day?

[Philnemba]

LOL like 1.26 milliseconds is going to effect me :P

[eargosedown]

Philnemba said:

LOL like 1.26 milliseconds is going to effect me :P

Oh, it will.

It will.

[Cjwright79]

That's it. That's the last straw. Suicide tim.

[Georgef551]

Somehow, I am SURE Al Gore will make a big stink about it being Global Warming.

Yeah, it has nothing to do with that.
Exactly.

[Nems]

Kirby said:

How upset are YOU now that you will be missing an extra millisecond out of your day?

I'm crushed. That means I need to play more Doom to make up for that lost time. ):

[Abyssalstudios1]

Wait, what? This cannot be! Time for the Uberman sleep schedule!

[Aliotroph?]

The dumbasses at space.com didn't even get the units right for that story. They were supposed to write 1.26 microseconds. Now if I live to be thousands of years old I can have an extra day in my life! :D

[stickguy5000]

Hey if we all turn our clocks back 1 millisecond it'll be like it used to be.

[phi108]

Georgef551 said:

Somehow, I am SURE Al Gore will make a big stink about it being Global Warming.

Yeah, it has nothing to do with that.
Exactly.

Exactly, Al Gore isn't that stupid, while some people might be stupid enough to asuume he would be stupid enough to be that stupid.... or whatever. So stay on topic.

Anyway, so it says that previous quakes (might) have had an even greater effect on Earth's rotation, which I didn't know, so in that context, i'm not worried. But I am surprised that a quake would have an effect at all; I assumed that since there really isn't effective friction against space, it would take an asteroid or other outside force to change the spin speed. I guess I need to work on my earth science and physics.

[Aliotroph?]

You do indeed. This is the same thing that causes figure skaters to spin really fast when they pull all their limbs in, only on a geologic scale. Things like this should in theory be affected by construction too. Fill the Three-Gorges reservoir and change the Earth's spin; build cities using stones from across the world and change the Earth's spin. Awesome.

My favourite way to mess with this kind of thing is to stick all my limbs out and get spinning fast on an office chair. Then I pull all my limbs in and the chair goes so fast it usually falls over.

[GreyGhost]

I don't care if we're talking milli or microseconds, the BIG question is - are demos more likely to desync now that the days are shorter?

[phi108]

Aliotroph? said:

This is the same thing that causes figure skaters to spin really fast when they pull all their limbs in

Oh of course, I never thought about that on such a huge scale! So I suppose with enough mountain building effects, if they aren't exactly cancelled out by erosion, the days on earth slowly get longer as well. Really freaky to think about.

[Kirby]

Cjwright79 said:

That's it. That's the last straw. Suicide tim.

Why would you want tim to suicide? He's such a nice guy!

[CODOR]

That's okay, it undid 75 years or so of increases in the length of the day due to tidal acceleration...

[Aliotroph?]

I read a book about the moon my mom got in 1962 or so. The part about tidal acceleration was the only part that still seemed accurate besides the things they tell everybody in school about moon phases and such. It still had these glorious predictions about the outcomes of the Gemini and Apollo programs. That hang-glider thing they wanted for Gemini (instead of parachutes) looked cool.

[Archfile]

You never know when NASA is wrong.

[baronofheck82]

Kirby said:

So some guy in NASA says our days have gotten shorter

How upset are YOU now that you will be missing an extra millisecond out of your day?

How upset am I? I'm not upset at all. A millisecond does not effect me and I do not care o_o

[Snakes]

Oh shit... I just realized that I have a 10 page paper due tomorrow, and now I find out that the all-important millisecond it takes to click on the print icon is lost?! FUUUUUUUUUU-

[Quasar]

GreyGhost said:

I don't care if we're talking milli or microseconds, the BIG question is - are demos more likely to desync now that the days are shorter?

Considering the phase of the moon and the position of the Sun in the sign of Capricorn are known to affect demo sync, probably so.

[RestlessRodent]

GreyGhost said:

I don't care if we're talking milli or microseconds, the BIG question is - are demos more likely to desync now that the days are shorter?

I just checked DOOM2.EXE's DEMO1... it desynced!

On another note, at least we got back some time lost from the moon slowing us down (making days longer adding lead seconds every year or so).

[Csonicgo]

Kirby said:

How upset are YOU now that you will be missing an extra millisecond out of your day?

We should ask the Cesium atom what he thinks about it.

[Georgef551]

phi108 said:

Exactly, Al Gore isn't that stupid, while some people might be stupid enough to asuume he would be stupid enough to be that stupid.... or whatever. So stay on topic.

Someone brought that up on the radio, but I wouldn't have put it past him, although that extra three inches of movement is going to cause climate chaos! :)

Anyway, so it says that previous quakes (might) have had an even greater effect on Earth's rotation, which I didn't know, so in that context, i'm not worried. But I am surprised that a quake would have an effect at all; I assumed that since there really isn't effective friction against space, it would take an asteroid or other outside force to change the spin speed. I guess I need to work on my earth science and physics.

There is very very little friction, because the Earth's rotation is ever so slowly decreasing over time, not enough that we'd see even a picoosecond's difference over a lifetime, but there is friction.
There's also momentum, in which the quake .
Let's say your refrigerator has a faulty shelf, that likes to let go. When it does, you hear it give, and the refrigerator will shake a little. There is a force applied to at least shake it, and shift the contents on other shelves, yet it's just sitting there with no outside forces applied. If there was one hell of a failure, the refrigerator might move, but that's got to be a big one.

[Ninjalah]

I guess losing any time at all is kinda sad, but a millionth of a second? I'm not sure if humans should even be able to recognize that.

[TheDarkArchon]

The last time I checked, a millisecond was a thousandth of a second.

[Ninjalah]

TheDarkArchon said:

The last time I checked, a millisecond was a thousandth of a second.

Yes, but a microsecond is supposedly a millionth of a second. Did I read wrong or did a couple people say that there was a typo and that it was really a microsecond?

[GreyGhost]

Here's the NASA article - we are talking microseconds.

[Kirby]

Csonicgo said:

We should ask the Cesium atom what he thinks about it.

You won't get some Cesium and drop in water. Over webcam. Right in front of you.

You won't

[Aliotroph?]

Yeah, I already posted about how it was supposed to say 1.26 microseconds. Honestly, you shouldn't be allowed to write science news professionally without a science degree.

[deathbringer]

Apparently some huge waterfall somewhere affects earth's rotation too, due to the mass of water being shifted at the speed it is.

Of course, given the nature of gravity and relativity everything that happens to every atom in the universe affects every other.