Word: leap
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Those who can't wait to see 2008 come to a close will have to endure an extra second - literally. On Dec. 31, just before 7 p.m. Eastern time, a leap second will be added to atomic clocks around the world to realign Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the international standard for atomic clocks, with Earth's rotational period. The reason for the intermittent mismatch between these two measurements lies not with the clocks but with the movement of the planet, which is decelerating at an average rate of two milliseconds...
...your kitchen clock, an aspect of earthly timekeeping that has caused much consternation historically, vexing everyone from Julius Caesar to Pope Gregory XIII. So, in 1972, an international agreement decreed that instead of continually revising the definition of a second, atomic clocks would be adjusted by adding a leap second each time an appreciable discrepancy was detected by observations made at the International Earth Rotation Service in Paris. Since then, 24 leap seconds have been added, either on June 30 or Dec. 31; the last one was tacked on in 2005. At that rate, "it will be 5,040 years...
...needn't worry about resynchronizing the clocks on your electronic devices; they'll adjust themselves. Cell phones, for instance, will receive a signal from a cell-phone base station, many of which often rely on commercially available rubidium atomic clocks. But if you would like to witness the leap second pass with your own eyes, log on to NIST's Web clock shortly before midnight Greenwich Mean Time, and watch as 23:59:59 changes to 23:59:60, a feat that only NIST's clock can achieve...
...inherent modesty of their own gifts. But this is not so; we emerge from their movies frustrated by their failures to grasp and shake our souls. I would like to propose a cinematic moratorium on this subject: a thoughtful silence, rich in remembrance, but lacking in the desire to leap forth a couple of times a year with slack, distant, by-the-numbers products like Good...
...They stop occasionally to examine one of the many Persian carpets arrayed on a wall the length of a tennis court. Against the black cloth of the exhibition hall's walls, the brightly colored handmade silk carpets - in vibrant blues and greens, luscious reds and purples - almost leap off the backdrop...