You Call THAT A Leap Year...?!

From time to time around February, I've mentioned to non-Jewish friends and neighbors how the Jewish leap year differs from the secular--how, opposed to the addition of a day to February once every four years, in the Jewish leap year an entire month is added periodically according to an 18-year cycle. (It is odd though that despite adding an extra month of Adar, it doesn't seem to help in getting ready for Pesach).

But this year, there is another addition to keep the secular calendar straight.
Not a month.
Not a day.

It's a second.

Reuters reports:

Get ready for a minute with 61 seconds. Scientists are delaying the start of 2006 by the first "leap second" in seven years, a timing tweak meant to make up for changes in the Earth's rotation.

The adjustment will be carried out by sticking an extra second into atomic clocks worldwide at the stroke of midnight Coordinated Universal Time, the widely adopted international standard, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology said this week.

...Coordinated Universal Time coincides with winter time in London. On the U.S. East Coast, the extra second occurs just before 7 p.m. on New Year's Eve. Atomic clocks at that moment will read 23:59:60 before rolling over to all zeros.

A leap second is added to keep uniform timekeeping within 0.9 second of the Earth's rotational time, which can speed up or slow down because of many factors, including ocean tides. The first leap second was added on June 30, 1972, according to NIST, an arm of the U.S. Commerce Department.

And why all the fuss?

...Precise time measurements are needed for high-speed communications systems among other modern technologies.

I'm counting the seconds.

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