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criddell 3 hours ago

I wonder if that's what electricity producers do? If you are selling 50 or 60 Hz service, an extra second here or there must really mess things up.

lgeorget 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A few years ago, a dispute between Kosovo and Serbia caused the entire European grid to drift away from 50.000Hz down to 49.996Hz. Millions of microwave clocks across the continent ended up 6 minutes late: https://hackaday.com/2018/03/09/europe-loses-six-minutes-due....

jefftk 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Clocks used to be able to use the 60Hz cycle to track time, and grid providers would run slightly slow or fast ("time error correction") to get back into sync. A leap second would just be part of this.

I believe in the US this error correction has been discontinued in the East and in Texas, but is still done in the West for some kind of non-clock "inadvertent interchange" reasons I don't understand.

wincy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Wait is that why my oven and microwave clocks are constantly getting out of sync by multiple minutes every year?

2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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