(Roughly) Daily

Artist Bill Domonkos:

I view my work as a collision and recombination of ideas. My process unfolds gradually and spontaneously—using found materials such as archive film footage, photographs, and the internet. I experiment by combining, altering, editing and reassembling using digital technology, special effects and animation to create a new kind of experience. I am interested in the absurd, as well as moments of sublime beauty—to renew and transform materials, experiences and ideas. The extraordinary thing about cinema is its ability to suggest the ineffable—something that cannot or should not be expressed in words, only hinted at through sounds and images. It is this elusive, dreamlike quality that informs my work.

Check out more of the work that The Boston Globe‘s Michael Hardy calls “Spooky. Hypnotic. Lush. Witty. Sublime.” at his site, and on his Tumblr, devoted to GIFs like those above.

* Max Ernst

###

As we amuse ourselves with animation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that the first leap second was added to a day.  The modern definition of a “second” was settled in 1874 by European scientists working from Muslim scholars’ improvement on Ptolemy’s Second Century calculations.  But in the early 1960’s astronomers realized that the rotation of the earth is irregular– fundamentally, it is slowing.  Coordinated Universal Time (CUT), calculated with an atomic clock, was systematically slowed each year, for a decade, to compensate…. But that meant that CUT and UTC (the time standard used by broadcasters, transportation providers, and other commercial and military users, a standard still fixed on the original definition of the “second”) were diverging.  To true them up, the leap second was added to the UTC.  Since 1972, a total of 25 seconds have been added– that’s to say, the Earth has slowed down 25 seconds compared to atomic time since then.  (But this does not mean that days are 25 seconds longer nowadays: only the days on which the leap seconds are inserted have 86,401 instead of the usual 86,400 seconds.)

 source