because of time and math and stuff" -- Former Governor and forever quitter Sarah Palin.

(The kg standard is no longer a kg)

to my alien abduction?
Well that's two thousandths of a second I'll never get back


Thanks Science

If you multiply 2/1000 sec per day by the 200,000,000 years in the next paragraph, you get a huge number of hours, not the one hour extension of the day that would occur in that period. In other words, the article is internally inconsistent in a rather obvious way if you have a passing sense of the scale of time.

Elsewhere in the article it talks about 2 milliseconds per century (two thousandths of a second), which is consistent with the scale of the times involved. But in the first paragraph it applies it to each and "every day". A competent science writer or a competent proof-reader would catch such an obvious error.

Basing calculations on one hour retardation per 200,000,000 years and 3600 seconds per hour, we can divide out and get 55,556 years to lose one second. The reciprocal of that is 0.000018 seconds retardation per year, which is 0.018 milliseconds or 18 microseconds (nearly 20) per year or 2 milliseconds per century.

The article also claims that the internet packets travel in "perfectly timed" synchrony. A basic understanding of the internet reveals that the principle of operation explicitly does not require perfect timing. The packets are sent asynchronously and simply reassembled into the file at the receiving end. If the internet required perfect timing in the chain of dozens of computers involved in sending a web page, then it would fail immediately.