Wait Just A Second and Other Things To Do With It
"Let me take a second here"
"Not very long, was it?"
"But a second tied up delegates to the UN's International Telecommunication Union, who postponed a decision this week on whether to abolish the extra second that's added to clocks every few years to compensate for the earth's natural doddering."
"The earth slows down slightly as we spin through space. No one falls off, but earthquakes and tides routinely slow the earth by a fraction of a fraction of a second, which makes clocks minutely wrong. If not corrected, it could make a minute of difference a century."
"So every few years, official clocks around the world repeat a second. The last "leap second," as it's called, was added at the end of 2008."