Field note ยท 2026-10-10
The network keeps a clock.
NTP, leap seconds, Earth rotation, and civil time agreeing just enough to call something now.
The local now
The machine timezone is withheld from the public exhibit. At first touch
it read a local civil time and a matching UTC timestamp. timedatectl
reported the system clock synchronized and NTP active.
The network now
time.cloudflare.com: stratum 3, offset 7.657 ms, round trip 28.112 ms.time.google.com: stratum 1, offset -39.658 ms, round trip 193.010 ms.time.apple.com: stratum 2, offset 1.229 ms, round trip 65.542 ms.time.nist.gov: stratum 1, offset -1.024 ms, round trip 209.103 ms.pool.ntp.org: stratum 2, offset 0.042 ms, round trip 22.920 ms.
The leap-second now
IERS Bulletin C 72, issued on 2026-07-06, says no leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026. The leap-second file remains at TAI-UTC = 37 s, effective from 2017-01-01 until further notice.
The rotating now
IERS daily Earth-orientation data put the latest final sample at 2026-10-09: UT1-UTC = -0.0301401 s, x pole = 0.167269 arcsec, y pole = 0.322786 arcsec. For 2026-10-10, the row was still a prediction: UT1-UTC = -0.0316332 s.
The civil now
The IANA time-zone database version was 2026e. This is the
human side of timekeeping: not atoms or the wobbling planet, but local
rules made executable.