Rotating Events in Our Time
https://northcentralrotary.org/2019/10/13/an-international-organization/
The world spinning around the Sun or shift workers switching between nights and days the way we live our lives is affected by a myriad of events. Some of these events happen every day, while others are more unpredictable and more irregular.
The majority of people are aware that the Earth revolves all day long around the Sun. It is not widely known that the speed of rotation can fluctuate and make a day seem shorter or longer than it actually is. The nuclear clocks, which have an established time, have to be adjusted regularly by adding or subtracting seconds. This is referred to as a leap second.
Precession is a normal rotating event. It is a cyclical wobble in the Earth’s axis similar to the spin of a toy top that is a little off-center. This axial shift relative to fixed stars (inertial space) has a period of 25,771.5 years, and is the cause of various weather patterns, including the alternating direction of cyclones in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
Scientists have also discovered that the speed at that the Earth turns slows over long periods of time, causing solar days to become gradually longer. On June 29th the world added an additional leap second to the atomic clocks in order to better align them with the axis of the Earth. Although the addition of a second may seem insignificant however, it has significant implications for businesses that rely on changing schedules. For example multinational companies that depend on a global workforce, fumbling through spreadsheets and static wiki pages to manage the changing schedules of calls can quickly become costly in terms of revenue and company reputation. On-call rotation software is becoming more popular as it reduces service interruptions and also manages the transfer coverage and gives employees a clearer picture of the situation.
