"Leap seconds are an inconvenience...," said Ken Seidelmann, a research professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and former director of astrometry at the U.S. Naval Observatory.
Killing off the leap second would also result in atomic clocks slowly outrunning the solar day by a rate of about 90 seconds a century. After many thousands of years, atomic clocks would say it's midday when outside the sun has yet to rise.
"This is replacing a small problem with a big problem further down the line," said Daniel Gambis, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory and the man who alerted timekeepers around the world to the next leap second. Unlike the better-known leap year, which adds a day to February in a familiar four-year cycle (with a few well-defined exceptions), the leap second is tacked on once every few years to synchronize atomic clocks — the world’s scientific timekeepers — with Earth’s rotational cycle, which, sadly, does not run quite like clockwork. The next one is scheduled for June 30 (do not bother to adjust your watch).
Still, the time for change has come, she argued. Unless a last minute consensus is reached, delegates at the ITU meeting in Geneva are expected to vote on the issue Thursday or Friday.UPDATE: ITU Radiocommunication Assembly Defers Decision to Eliminate the Leap Second
USA Ultimate Rules [11th Edition] already address a similar violation.
Under XIV. Marker/1. Fast Count:
a. If the marker does not say stalling to initiate or resume a stall count, counts at intervals of less than one second, or skips a number in the count, it is a fast count.
b. If a fast count occurs in such a manner that the thrower does not have a reasonable opportunity to call fast count before the first utterance of the word ten, the play is treated as a contested stall ( the stall count resumes at 8).
c. If this (b. from above) occurs in the same possession following a contested stall, the stall count resumes at 6.
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