Daniel sent us this one — and I have to say, it's the kind of prompt that sounds simple until you realize he's essentially asking us to explain why time itself isn't falling apart. He's been deep in the timekeeping rabbit hole, wants a desk clock with local time and UTC, and he's arrived at the question of atomic time. His understanding, in his own words, is that atomic time is based on physical degradation of a material, that UTC is the baseline for planetary timekeeping, and that we add leap seconds to keep UTC in sync with atomic time. Then he asks whether astronomical time would even be a reliable basis for timekeeping, and wants the full download on how atomic time actually works. He also mentions that Iran has a half-hour time zone offset, which is true, and that ceasefires should always be declared in UTC — a position I find myself surprisingly passionate about.
Before we dive in, I should mention — DeepSeek V four Pro is writing our script today. Which feels appropriate for an episode about precision timekeeping, somehow.
Is that a compliment to the model or a subtle jab at our usual writer?
I haven't decided yet. Let's see how the episode turns out.
So, atomic time. Daniel's prompt has a few layers, and I want to start with the one that jumped out at me first — his description of atomic time as being based on "physical degradation of a material." Herman, I could feel you twitching when I read that part.
I was twitching. And I want to be careful here because Daniel explicitly invited correction, and he's asking in good faith. But that description — "physical degradation" — is probably the single most common misconception about atomic clocks. They do not measure decay. They do not measure degradation. There is nothing breaking down. An atomic clock measures the frequency of microwave radiation emitted or absorbed by electrons as they jump between specific energy levels in an atom. It's not a process of wearing out — it's a process of oscillation that is, for all practical purposes, perfectly stable.
It's not like a radioactive half-life situation.
Not at all. Radioactive decay is a completely different phenomenon, and it's actually not nearly precise enough for timekeeping. What we're measuring in a cesium atomic clock — and cesium-133 is the standard — is the transition between two hyperfine energy levels of the ground state. When an electron flips between these two states, it absorbs or emits radiation at exactly nine billion, one hundred ninety-two million, six hundred thirty-one thousand, seven hundred seventy cycles per second. That number is the definition of the second.
That number is the definition of the second. Let's sit with that for a moment. The second is not defined by a fraction of a day. It's not defined by the earth's rotation. It's defined by that specific atomic transition. When did that happen?
Nineteen sixty-seven. The Thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures formally redefined the second from the astronomical definition — which had been one eighty-six-thousand-four-hundredth of a mean solar day — to the atomic definition based on cesium. And this is where the whole story gets interesting, because once you define the second by atomic processes, you've created two different kinds of time that don't quite agree with each other.
Daniel's question about whether astronomical time provides a reliable basis — you're saying we already answered that question, and the answer was no.
The answer was a definitive no, and we've known this for decades. The earth's rotation is not constant. There are three main sources of variation. First, a long-term slowing caused by tidal friction — the moon's gravity pulling on the earth's oceans creates a braking effect that lengthens the day by about one point seven milliseconds per century. Second, irregular fluctuations caused by the movement of molten material in the earth's core, which can change the planet's moment of inertia. And third, seasonal variations — the day is slightly longer in northern hemisphere winter and slightly shorter in summer, because of changes in atmospheric angular momentum. Wind patterns literally change how fast the earth spins.
The wind is messing with our clocks.
The two thousand four Indian Ocean earthquake, magnitude nine point one, shortened the day by about two point six eight microseconds because it redistributed mass toward the center of the earth. The two thousand eleven earthquake in Japan shortened the day by one point eight microseconds. These are measurable, real effects.
If we'd stuck with astronomical time, we'd have a second that literally changes length depending on the weather, seismic activity, and the moon's gravitational pull. That's not a standard. That's a suggestion.
And this is what drove the shift to atomic time. By the nineteen fifties, scientists had atomic clocks that were already more stable than the earth's rotation. The first practical cesium clock was built at the UK's National Physical Laboratory in nineteen fifty-five by Louis Essen and Jack Parry. Once you have a clock that's more stable than the planet itself, you have to make a decision — which one is actually defining time?
We chose the atoms.
We chose the atoms. But — and this is the crucial but — we didn't want to completely abandon astronomical time either. People still care about where the sun is in the sky. So we created this hybrid system called Coordinated Universal Time, UTC, which runs on atomic seconds but is periodically adjusted to stay within zero point nine seconds of astronomical time, which is called UT1.
The adjustment mechanism is the leap second.
The leap second. And this is where Daniel's explanation needs some refining. He described it as adding leap seconds to keep UTC in sync with atomic time. It's actually the opposite. Atomic time — International Atomic Time, TAI — runs straight through without any adjustments. It's the pure count of atomic seconds since a defined epoch. UTC is the one that gets adjusted, and it gets adjusted to stay in sync with the earth's rotation, not with atomic time. UTC is essentially TAI plus an integer number of seconds, where that integer changes when a leap second is added.
TAI is the pure atomic count, and UTC is the politically compromised version that pretends the sun still matters.
I wouldn't say politically compromised — though we'll get to the politics — but yes, that's the structure. TAI is currently thirty-seven seconds ahead of UTC. That number has grown over time because we've added thirty-seven leap seconds since the system started in nineteen seventy-two.
Thirty-seven leap seconds. And every single one of those was a decision that had to be made by someone.
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, IERS, based in Paris. They monitor the difference between UTC and UT1 by tracking the earth's rotation using very long baseline interferometry — essentially a network of radio telescopes observing distant quasars to measure the earth's orientation with extraordinary precision. When the difference between UTC and UT1 is predicted to exceed zero point nine seconds, the IERS issues a bulletin announcing a leap second, typically about six months in advance.
This is where the passionate people Daniel mentioned come in. The leap second debate.
Oh, it's one of the most contentious technical debates I've ever encountered. And I'm a retired pediatrician who's seen medical debates. The leap second controversy makes those look like polite disagreements about tea.
What's the case against leap seconds?
The case against leap seconds is that they are operationally dangerous. When you insert an extra second into the global timekeeping system, every computer system on the planet has to handle that correctly. And they frequently don't. The leap second is typically inserted at the end of June or December, and the UTC sequence goes from twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes, fifty-nine seconds to twenty-three hours, fifty-nine minutes, sixty seconds, and then to zero hours, zero minutes, zero seconds. That extra digit in the seconds field — the sixty — breaks assumptions that are baked into software at every level.
Because programmers assume there are sixty seconds in a minute, not sixty-one.
They assume that time always moves forward, that a given timestamp is unique, that you can calculate the difference between two timestamps by simple subtraction. All of those assumptions can fail during a leap second event. In twenty-twelve, a leap second caused major outages at Reddit, Mozilla, Qantas, and several other large systems. The Qantas outage was particularly concerning because it affected their reservation system, grounding flights. In twenty-seventeen, Cloudflare had a significant outage because their DNS resolver couldn't handle the leap second.
We're adding these seconds to keep our clocks aligned with a planet that doesn't rotate consistently, and in doing so, we're causing actual infrastructure failures.
That's the argument in a nutshell. And the cumulative effect of skipping the leap second would be relatively small. If we stopped adding leap seconds today, UTC would drift away from solar time by about one minute per century. By the year twenty-one hundred, solar noon would be off by about a minute. By the year three thousand, it would be off by about fifteen minutes. The anti-leap-second camp argues that this is a trivial inconvenience compared to the ongoing operational risk of inserting leap seconds.
One minute per century. I have to say, that doesn't sound catastrophic.
It doesn't, and that's why the international community has been moving toward abolition. In November twenty-twenty-two, the General Conference on Weights and Measures — the same body that defined the second in nineteen sixty-seven — voted to suspend the leap second starting in twenty thirty-five. The plan is to let UTC and UT1 diverge for at least a century, possibly longer, and to revisit the question at that point.
Twenty thirty-five. So we have about nine more years of leap seconds.
Yes, though there are still details being worked out. The decision was to suspend the leap second, not abolish it permanently, and there's ongoing discussion about what the maximum allowable drift should be. Some proposals suggest letting it accumulate to one minute, others to one hour. But the direction is clear — the world is moving away from tying our clocks to the sun.
Which brings me back to something Daniel mentioned. He talked about the Iran ceasefire and the ambiguity about which time zone the ceasefire was referenced in. That's not hypothetical — that actually happened, right?
It happens more often than you'd think. There was a well-documented case during one of the Israel-Hamas ceasefires where the timing was specified in local time without clarifying which local time — Gaza time, Israel time, or something else. And as Daniel points out, this is precisely why militaries operate on UTC. The US military uses Zulu time — same thing, UTC — for all operational communications. Every air traffic control system in the world uses it. The convention is that any time-sensitive military or aviation communication defaults to UTC unless otherwise specified.
Iran, as Daniel noted, has that peculiar half-hour offset — UTC plus three thirty.
Iran Standard Time is UTC plus three hours and thirty minutes. It's not the only half-hour time zone — India is UTC plus five thirty, Newfoundland is UTC minus three thirty in winter — but Iran's is particularly notable because they also observe daylight saving time, so they shift to UTC plus four thirty for part of the year. The half-hour offsets exist because some countries decided they wanted their solar noon to align more precisely with clock noon. Iran spans roughly from longitude forty-four east to sixty-three east, so a single time zone with an offset of three and a half hours puts solar noon reasonably close to twelve o'clock for much of the country.
If you're negotiating a ceasefire with Iran, and someone says "the ceasefire takes effect at noon," you have to ask: noon in Tehran, noon in Jerusalem, noon in Washington, or noon in UTC?
Tehran's noon is UTC plus three thirty, or four thirty depending on the season. Jerusalem is UTC plus two, or three during daylight saving. Washington is UTC minus four or five. The difference between Tehran and Washington can be as much as eight and a half or nine and a half hours. If someone fires a missile at what they believe is one minute before the ceasefire, and the other side believes the ceasefire started an hour ago, you have a catastrophe.
This is why Daniel's passion for UTC as a universal baseline makes so much practical sense. It's not just a technical preference — it's a conflict-prevention mechanism.
It's worth noting that the time zone database Daniel mentioned, the TZDB, is itself a fascinating piece of infrastructure. It's maintained by a small group of volunteers, primarily Paul Eggert at UCLA, and it tracks every time zone change in every country — daylight saving transitions, offset changes, historical changes going back to the nineteen seventies. When a country decides to change its time zone rules, someone has to update the TZDB, and then that update has to propagate to every operating system, every phone, every server.
Countries do change their rules. Sometimes on very short notice.
All the time. In twenty-twenty-two, Lebanon decided to delay the start of daylight saving time by a month — but the decision was announced only a few days before the transition was supposed to happen. Some institutions followed the government's new schedule, others stuck with the old one, and for a period, Lebanon effectively had two different time zones operating simultaneously. The TZDB maintainers had to scramble to issue an update. In twenty-thirteen, Samoa skipped an entire day — December thirtieth — to move from UTC minus eleven to UTC plus thirteen, effectively switching sides of the international date line to align with its trading partners in Australia and New Zealand.
A country can just decide to skip a day.
A country can decide to skip a day. And the TZDB has to record it, and your phone has to handle it. This is the invisible infrastructure that Daniel's talking about — the layer of standardization that makes everything work, and that most people never think about until it breaks.
Alright, let's go deeper into the atomic clocks themselves. You mentioned cesium-one thirty-three. How does the actual clock work? What's happening inside that box?
The core of a cesium atomic clock is a beam of cesium atoms, a microwave cavity, and a detector. You start by heating cesium metal to create a vapor of cesium atoms. You then use magnets to separate the atoms into two groups based on which hyperfine energy state they're in. The atoms in the lower energy state pass into a microwave cavity where they're exposed to microwave radiation at roughly nine point one nine gigahertz. If the microwave frequency exactly matches the cesium transition frequency, the atoms absorb the radiation and flip to the higher energy state. A second magnet then separates the atoms again, and a detector measures how many atoms made the transition. The clock's electronics continuously adjust the microwave frequency to maximize the number of atoms that flip, and that frequency becomes the clock's output.
It's a feedback loop. You're tuning the microwave until you hit the resonance frequency of the atom.
And the extraordinary thing is how precise this is. The best cesium fountain clocks — where the atoms are launched upward in a vacuum chamber and fall back down under gravity, giving you a much longer observation time — can achieve accuracies of about one second in one hundred million years. The NIST-F2 cesium fountain clock has an uncertainty of about one times ten to the minus sixteen. That means it would take about three hundred million years for the clock to gain or lose one second.
Three hundred million years. The earth didn't even have dinosaurs three hundred million years ago. We're talking about a clock that could have started running before the Permian period and still be accurate to within a second.
Cesium clocks aren't even the most precise clocks we have now. Optical lattice clocks, which use strontium or ytterbium atoms and operate at optical frequencies — hundreds of terahertz rather than gigahertz — have reached uncertainties below one times ten to the minus eighteen. These clocks are so sensitive that they can detect the gravitational time dilation predicted by general relativity over a height difference of just a few millimeters. If you lift an optical clock by one centimeter, the change in gravitational potential measurably changes the clock's rate.
The clock is measuring the fact that time moves differently at different altitudes.
And this isn't a flaw — it's a feature. These clocks are now being used for geodesy, literally mapping the earth's gravitational field by comparing the rates of clocks at different locations. We've gone from measuring time by the sun to measuring the shape of the planet by the subtle warping of time itself.
That's genuinely mind-bending. So let me trace the chain from Daniel's desk clock to this. He wants a simple clock showing local time and UTC. The UTC on that clock is derived from an atomic time standard maintained by a global network of cesium clocks and increasingly optical clocks. Those clocks are so precise that they reveal relativistic effects. And the UTC they produce is periodically adjusted with leap seconds to keep it roughly aligned with a planet whose rotation is constantly changing due to tides, winds, earthquakes, and the sloshing of molten iron in its core.
That's the chain. And the global network of clocks that defines UTC is itself a remarkable piece of coordination. About four hundred atomic clocks at roughly eighty laboratories around the world contribute to International Atomic Time. The Bureau International des Poids et Mesures in Paris collects data from all these clocks, applies algorithms to produce a weighted average, and publishes the result as TAI. UTC is then derived from TAI by applying the accumulated leap seconds.
Four hundred clocks. And they all have to agree on what time it is, to within nanoseconds.
The time transfer between these laboratories is itself a technical challenge. For decades, they used GPS satellite signals, but GPS has its own clock system — GPS time, which is actually ahead of UTC by eighteen seconds because GPS doesn't use leap seconds. These days, they also use two-way satellite time and frequency transfer, and there's growing interest in using fiber optic networks for even more precise time transfer.
GPS has its own time. Glonass, the Russian system, presumably has its own time. Galileo, the European system, has its own time. BeiDou, the Chinese system, has its own time. How many different times are being maintained simultaneously?
At least half a dozen major time scales. GPS time is maintained by the US Naval Observatory and is steered to UTC but doesn't apply leap seconds, so there's a constant offset. Glonass time is based on UTC plus three hours, because that's Moscow time. Galileo system time is steered to UTC. BeiDou time is steered to UTC but uses its own realization. And then there's BIPM's TAI and UTC, plus national realizations — UTC USNO, UTC NIST, UTC PTB in Germany. They're all kept closely aligned, typically within tens of nanoseconds, but they're distinct systems maintained by different organizations.
This is the part where I start to wonder if we've over-engineered this. You have a planet that wobbles, winds that change the length of the day, four hundred atomic clocks in eighty labs, multiple satellite constellations each with their own time, a database maintained by volunteers to track every country's political decisions about daylight saving, and a leap second system that breaks the internet every few years. And all of this exists so that when Daniel looks at his desk clock, it says the right thing.
Yet it works. It works astonishingly well. The fact that you can pull out your phone anywhere on the planet and it will display the correct local time to within a fraction of a second — that's a miracle of twentieth and twenty-first century engineering. Your phone is receiving signals from atomic clocks in space, applying time zone rules from a constantly updated database, and presenting you with a number that you can trust completely.
I'm not saying it isn't impressive. I'm saying it's fragile in ways that most people don't appreciate. Daniel clearly appreciates it, which is why he's asking these questions. He mentioned the TZDB — the fact that he knows about the time zone database tells me he's gone deeper than most people ever will.
The TZDB is one of those pieces of infrastructure that's critical but maintained on a shoestring. Paul Eggert has been the primary maintainer since the nineteen nineties. The database is used by essentially every operating system — Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, Windows in some configurations — and by programming languages like Python, Java, and Ruby. A single person's decisions about how to encode time zone history affect billions of devices.
That person has to deal with things like Lebanon's last-minute daylight saving change, or Samoa skipping a day, or whatever political dispute leads a country to change its offset by thirty minutes just to make a point.
The database doesn't just track current rules — it tracks historical rules going back decades. If you need to know what time it was in Moscow on January first, nineteen ninety-two, the TZDB has that information. The Soviet Union had a complex history of daylight saving changes, and Russia has changed its time zone rules multiple times since the collapse of the USSR. Every change is recorded.
Let me bring this back to Daniel's specific questions, because I want to make sure we're answering what he actually asked. First, would astronomical time provide a reliable basis for timekeeping? I think we've answered that — no, it wouldn't, because the earth's rotation is variable on multiple timescales. Second, what is atomic time's relationship to astronomical time? Atomic time is the stable reference, astronomical time is the messy reality we live in, and UTC is the compromise that uses atomic seconds but stays roughly aligned with the sun through leap seconds. Third, his explanation that atomic time is based on physical degradation — we've corrected that. It's based on atomic transitions, not decay. Fourth, are leap seconds and leap years different things? Yes, completely different.
Leap years exist because the earth's orbital period around the sun is roughly three hundred sixty-five point two four two two days, not an integer number of days. Without leap years, the calendar would drift relative to the seasons by about one day every four years. Leap seconds exist because the earth's rotational period is roughly twenty-four hours plus a fraction of a second, and that fraction accumulates. They're both corrections for the mismatch between astronomical cycles and our integer-based timekeeping, but they correct for completely different astronomical phenomena — orbital period versus rotational period.
Here's a subtlety I don't think most people appreciate. The leap year correction is predictable. We know the orbital period to high precision, and we can schedule leap years centuries in advance. The leap second correction is not predictable. The earth's rotation varies in ways that can't be forecast more than about six months out. So you can't schedule leap seconds on a regular calendar — they're announced as needed.
That unpredictability is part of what makes leap seconds so problematic for software systems. You can't hardcode them. You need a mechanism to receive updates. And if your system doesn't get the update, or gets it late, or handles the transition incorrectly, things break.
When the IERS announces a leap second, how does that information propagate to Daniel's phone?
The IERS publishes a bulletin, which gets incorporated into the TZDB as a leap second table. Operating system vendors pick up the TZDB update and distribute it through their normal update channels. Network time protocol servers are configured to handle leap seconds by either "smearing" the extra second over a longer period or by inserting it precisely at midnight. Google, for instance, uses a leap smear technique where they distribute the extra second over a twenty-hour period, gradually adjusting their clocks so that no single second is sixty-one seconds long.
Google just decided to handle leap seconds differently than the official standard.
And Amazon does something similar. And there's an ongoing debate about whether leap smearing is a reasonable engineering compromise or a violation of the standard that creates its own problems. If different systems smear differently, or if some smear and some don't, you can end up with clocks that disagree during the smear period.
This is the kind of thing that keeps infrastructure engineers awake at night. Not the physics, not the astronomy — the question of whether your time synchronization strategy is compatible with your cloud provider's time synchronization strategy.
It connects back to what Daniel said about ceasefires. When precision matters — when a second can be the difference between a missile launch being legal or illegal under a ceasefire agreement — you need absolute clarity about what time it is and whose time you're using. The leap smear introduces ambiguity during the smear window. That's fine for displaying timestamps on a web page. It's potentially catastrophic for military or aviation applications.
Which is why those applications don't use smeared time. They use UTC with hard leap second insertion.
Different use cases, different timekeeping strategies, all layered on top of the same atomic reference.
Let's talk about the future a bit. You mentioned the twenty-twenty-two decision to suspend leap seconds by twenty thirty-five. What happens after that? Does UTC just drift away from the sun forever?
The current plan is to let it drift for at least a century and then reassess. A century of drift is about one minute. Most people won't notice a one-minute discrepancy between clock noon and solar noon. If we let it go for a thousand years, the drift would be about fifteen to twenty minutes, which is still within the range of what time zones already handle — the width of a time zone is ideally one hour, so a fifteen-minute offset is within the existing variation.
In a thousand years, we might just redefine the time zones to account for the drift, and nobody would really care.
Or we might decide to add a leap hour at some point, which would be a much bigger event but would only happen once every few thousand years. The operational disruption of a leap hour would be significant, but it would be so rare that it might be worth it.
There's something deeply human about all of this. We created this incredibly precise system based on the behavior of cesium atoms, a system that can measure relativistic effects and map the earth's gravitational field. And then we had to deliberately make it less precise — by adding leap seconds — because we still care about where the sun is. We can't quite let go of the astronomical reference.
The sun still matters. It matters for agriculture, for solar power, for human circadian rhythms. Even if we stopped adding leap seconds, we'd still organize our lives around daylight in ways that pure atomic time wouldn't capture. The compromise is messy, but it reflects a genuine tension between precision and lived experience.
The circadian point is interesting. The average human circadian period is about twenty-four point two hours, which means that without external cues — primarily light — we'd naturally wake up about twelve minutes later each day. Morning light hitting the retina is what resets the circadian clock, keeping us synchronized with the twenty-four-hour solar cycle. So even at the biological level, we're running on a slightly different clock than the planet, and we need a correction mechanism. It's leap seconds for your body.
That's a beautiful parallel. The earth's rotation is variable, our internal clocks are slightly off from the earth's rotation, and we've built an elaborate system of corrections — biological, astronomical, and atomic — to keep everything roughly aligned. And the system works. It's messy, it's political, it breaks occasionally, but it works. The time on Daniel's desk clock, the time on your phone, the time that governs financial transactions and GPS navigation and internet protocols — it's all traceable back to those cesium atoms, coordinated through a web of international agreements and volunteer-maintained databases and algorithms running in data centers around the world.
I want to circle back to one thing Daniel mentioned that we haven't fully addressed. He talked about UTC as a "quintessential line in the sand" — a fixed reference point that everything else is relative to. And I think that's exactly right, but it's worth emphasizing that UTC isn't fixed in the way that TAI is fixed. UTC has leap seconds. UTC is the politically negotiated version of time. TAI is the physics.
TAI is the physics. TAI has never had a leap second. It has run continuously at a constant rate since its epoch. Every cesium clock in the world, every optical clock, every time standard maintained by every national laboratory — they all ultimately aim to realize the same SI second. The differences between them are at the level of parts in ten to the sixteenth or smaller. That's the miracle of modern metrology.
Yet, if you ask most people what time it is, they don't want TAI. They want UTC, or their local time relative to UTC. They want the compromised version, because the compromised version is the one that tells them when the sun will rise.
That compromise is what makes timekeeping a human story, not just a physics story. The physics is elegant — atomic transitions, resonance frequencies, relativistic corrections. But the implementation is messy — international committees, volunteer database maintainers, last-minute political decisions about daylight saving, software systems that crash on leap seconds. Time is both the most precisely measured quantity in human history and one of the most politically contested.
Daniel, if you're listening — your desk clock showing local time and UTC is a window into one of the most extraordinary systems of coordination ever built. The UTC side of that clock is connected, through a chain of standards and measurements and international agreements, to a set of atomic clocks that are the most precise instruments humans have ever created. The local time side is connected to a database maintained by a small group of people who track every political decision about time zones around the world. And the relationship between them is mediated by a system of leap seconds that the international community has decided to phase out, because the operational pain of inserting them outweighs the astronomical benefit of keeping our clocks aligned with a slightly irregular planet.
Your explanation, Daniel, was mostly right in spirit. You correctly identified that atomic time is based on physical processes in atoms, that UTC is the baseline standard, and that leap seconds are the adjustment mechanism. The main correction is that atomic clocks measure oscillations, not degradation, and that leap seconds adjust UTC to match the earth's rotation, not to match atomic time. Atomic time is the thing that runs straight through — UTC is the thing that gets adjusted.
I'll also say, your instinct that ceasefires should be declared in UTC is absolutely correct, and it's the standard practice in military operations for exactly the reasons you identified. Time zone ambiguity in a ceasefire is not a theoretical concern — it's a real operational risk that has caused confusion in actual conflicts. UTC eliminates that ambiguity.
Your observation about Iran's half-hour offset — UTC plus three thirty — is a great example of how even within the UTC framework, time zones are political and cultural artifacts, not purely geographical ones. Iran could be on UTC plus three or UTC plus four and still be within the "correct" longitudinal range. They chose three thirty because it puts solar noon closer to twelve o'clock for Tehran. It's a choice, and the TZDB records it.
Alright, I think we've covered the science, the politics, the infrastructure, and the future of timekeeping. Should we see what Hilbert has for us?
Let's do it. And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The mantis shrimp has sixteen color-receptive cones in its eyes, compared to the three found in humans, allowing it to see ultraviolet, infrared, and polarized light — including a type of circularly polarized light that no other animal is known to detect.
That seems excessive.
It does seem excessive.
This has been My Weird Prompts. I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. If you enjoyed this episode, tell someone about it — or better yet, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. We read every one.
Until next time.
