Rotating Events in Our Time
It’s the world spinning around the Sun or shift workers switching between nights and days our lives are shaped by many spinning events. Some of them happen every day while others are more unpredictable and less predictable.
For instance, the majority of people are aware that Earth revolves around the Sun every day. It is less known that the speed of rotation can change and make the day appear shorter or longer than it really is. This is the reason that Atomic clocks that provide standardized time must be periodically adjusted by adding or subtracting seconds. This is known as leap seconds.
Precession is a regular rotating event. It is a circular wobble of the Earth’s axis similar to a toy top spinning that is a little off-center. This tilt in axial relation to fixed stars (inertial spaces) has an estimated duration of 25,771.5. It is responsible for many weather patterns, like the alternating direction between cyclones on the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
Scientists have also discovered that the speed at which the Earth is rotating slows down over long periods of time, which causes solar days to become gradually longer. That’s why, on June 29th the world added an extra second to atomic clocks in order that they could be more in line with the actual rotation of our planet. While the addition of a single second may seem small however, it could have important implications for businesses that rely on the changing of schedules. For instance multinational companies that depend on the world’s workforce, having to fumble through static spreadsheets and wiki pages to manage changing call schedules could be costly in terms of revenue and reputation. On-call rotation software is becoming more popular as it reduces interruptions in service and manages the coverage of transfers and offers transparency to employees.
