Legal Research

Longest Year Ever - really?

I'm wondering if this year, 2008, is the longest year ever? Economically it certainly feels like it's dragging on! With too many elections it often felt longish. But really, as time flows, is it the longest?

2008 was a Leap Year so it was already 366 days long.

Now we hear that we will have an extra second added year by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. The extra second will be added at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time, or 6:59:59 pm EST. The organization extra second is necessary because the Earth?s rotation has gradually slowed down, throwing the timescales of the rotation of the Earth and the one based on atomic time out of sync.

2008 Will Be Just a Second Longer

Now this might throw some of our more detail oriented colleagues into apoplexy. Have some fun with it but be careful out there! Ask your cataloguers to update the MARC time field. Ask your SysAdmin for a report on the impact of the Leap Second issue. Send your director a staffing request for analysis of the union contract impacts of the extra second on payroll this year-end. WooHoo. Make sure they're humour impaired first.

I seem to recall that the shortest year was the one where the they had to remove 11 days or something like that to align things with the official Leap Years. It had something to do with April Fool's day too and Orthodox Christmas or maybe I'm just muddled. Any reference librarians out there who want to track this down so I can bore my family over the holidays with more boring trivia? That's my trademark - boring uncle knowitall.

Is this the longest year?
What was the shortest year?
It was hard enough in Y2K to explain the lack of a year Zero! (Hey, maybe that's the shortest year - zero!)

I think that maybe the shortest year is the one just before you start school. Time just flows seamlessly from naptime to sandbox.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on December 10, 2008 (boomark / email).