Swans on Tea

Kottke: The speed of information travel, 1798 – 2009
The included link is chart showing the time it took for news of various events to reach London, and the resulting speed of that information. Kottke adds a couple of present-day data points to that.
[W]e’re not accustomed to news taking days or even hours to [...]

Built onFacts: Time and Navigation
Matt gives a brief summary of time and navigation. There’s one point that he glosses over, and it’s something that a lot of GPS summaries gloss over, to the point that they are misleading.
All a GPS satellite does is eternally broadcast two continuously updated pieces of information: its position [...]

Start the clock
A modest proposal for improving football: the ‘time-in’
If you’ve ever noticed that football games slow to a predictable crawl at the end of each half, the time-in is the rule for you. The idea is simple: When the clock is stopped, for whatever reason, a coach could call a “time-in,” and force the [...]

Why Can’t My Clocks Keep Time Accurately?
A short article, directed mostly at the problem of synchronization, as applied to everyday life: your electronic devices display different times. Why? Because you always have to synchronize your clocks, no matter how good they are. The question remains, how often do you need to [...]

Who Watches the Watchman?
Let’s say you own a big building full of valuable stuff. How do you make sure that the night watchman patrolling your factory floor or museum galleries after closing time actually makes his rounds? How do you know he’s inspecting every hallway, floor, and stairwell in the facility? How do you know [...]

Super clocks: More accurate than time itself
An article discussing the progression of atomic clock technology, and also relating to something I posted earlier, a discussion of what happens when the next generation of atomic clocks is deployed: the clocks won’t be the limiting factor in determining the time.
To tell the time consistently, all clocks [...]

Clock for geeks

I was listening to a podcast recently that delved into timekeeping and atomic clocks, and was surprised that they got a couple of details wrong. I haven’t done a post explaining how atomic clocks work, because that’s something easily found on the intertubes, and so I’m not particularly motivated to recreate Wikipedia or HowStuffWorks.
But [...]

Here comes the sun, or at least its shadow, at Dot Physics: When is the Sun directly overhead?
There’s a nice little video that accompanies the post which also demonstrates some of the foibles of doing experiments
What I want to do is change the question a little bit. Rhett points out that one of the [...]

Top 10 techno-calendars for 2009

What Do Timekeepers Do?
On New Year’s Eve at 6:59:59 p.m. ET, an “international consortium of timekeepers” will add one second to the world’s clock. How do you get to be an official timekeeper?
Earn a Ph.D. in astronomy and move to France. Tweaks to the official clock are announced by the Earth Orientation Center, a Paris-based [...]

Happy return to an arbitrarily chosen starting point in the orbit about our gravitational enslaver