Your articles are always so very informative and entertaining. For some reason, I never heard of leap seconds. I only leapt for seconds when I was a teenager competing with my brother. I soon learned that seconds caused belt overflow. ;-) I guess leap seconds are something that physicists are interested in. They don't seem to bother me one iota. Is an iota like a second? I guess that's a question for physicists, so I will bow out.

I am very familiar with doomsday predictions. I wonder if Prince is still "partying like it's 1999?" When Y2K came along we had mostly Macs at work. For some reason, the Mac operating system calendar ran from 1904 to 2040, so our Macs were not in jeopardy. However, some of the database programs I created had 2 digit years. All I had to do was go through the code and change those year fields to 4 digits and I was all set. I seem to recall the "major conversion" took me something like, two days.

I also seem to recall that many mainframe and even Windows operating systems, scrimping on space that code took up, add everything in 2 digits, requiring months to correct the problems.

I wrote several doomsday, apocalyptic stories in 2012 and completed a book of them, Verge of Apocalypse Tales, in October 2012. My birthday, along with my brother, was December 21, 2012. I entered the hospital on December 4 within an aggressive pneumonia that didn't respond to antibiotics because it may have been a fungus. On December 11, a surgeon operated on my right lung and removed the offending infection physically. Had the surgeon not done that, I was on a timeline to die on the 21st. Thankfully, I haven't had any more lung problems, or even any flus, since.

Not looking for doomsday any time soon. Although I do hear from authors here quite often that they fear the worst, almost daily. ;-)

Ron