The Bulletin of the Atomic Fiscal Scientists today sets its Clock at eleven cents to midnight, three cents closer than the previous setting and the closest the Clock has stood since the Bureau began declining to say when that was.

The Clock is read in cents rather than seconds in deference to the Bureau's scientific staff, none of whom will permit it to print a time. The Board regards this as a strength. An instrument that survives its own physicists is calibrated.

Midnight is June 30.

In reaching this setting the Board weighed the usual factors: obligations that compound, revenues that do not, the distance between the two, and the temperature.

The Bureau's methodology is the huddle. The colony rotates continuously, so that no penguin stands on the outside longer than it can afford. The Board notes that the rotation is the entire science. The cold is not distributed by the cold. It is distributed by the formation.

The Clock is set in Helsinki and reports a Rhode Island number from abroad. The Board finds the distance clarifying.

The Bureau chief does not swim. The Bureau chief flies. The Board considers the matter settled, and notes only that it was settled differently for everyone else.

Dissents, printed in full

The Board thanks its staff for their objections, which it has printed, and overruled, in cents.