It's Getting Lighter

Daylight Gained

Via daily timewaster

Time

This watch vibrates 1,296,000 times per hour
The Slow Mo Guys

This morning I'm watching the Slow Mo Guys and while they are entertaining I am wondering more about the cameras and how they synchronize them with the action. I mean, when you are trying to capture something that only takes a fraction of a second and your camera is recording a zillion frames a second, you want to be Johnny-on-the-spot when the bomb goes bang. High speed memory is expensive and you can only fit so much of that memory in the camera.

Trying to find 200 frames of explosion amongst 1.6 million black frames

The line on this image gives you idea of the problem. Anyway, I want to know more, so I go to YouTube page and I don't see anything about what I want, but I do find this cool video of an Accutron Watch (see above). 

Seconds

I am still reading A Deepness In The Sky by Vernor Vinge. I'm kind of slow, I read maybe a chapter a day, which I feel is about ten pages. It's a big book, and there's lots of chapters, so it's taking me a while.

Throughout the book Vern tells time by the number of seconds, be it hundred or a thousand or a million. I'm comfortable with numbers, so I can generally figure out the amount of time we are talking about. Unfortunately I never remember those values so every time I run into a time, if I care about the amount of time, I have to do those calculations again. I wanted a scale that had both our conventional times and Vern's base-10 devoted system. It would need to be a logarithmic scale in order to accommodate all of our values. So I went prowling the net - and found bupkis. I did find one suggestion on how it might be done in javascript and html, but that's a lot of work, and I've already got a stack of obscure stuff to wade through. So I just compiled a list to see what I'm dealing with.

Some useful approximations:

• One thousand seconds, a Ksec, is about a quarter of an hour.
• One hundred thousand seconds is a little more than a day, 
• a million seconds is like a week and a half, 
• two and half million makes a month
• 30 million makes a year
• 300 million makes a decade
• 3 billion makes a century
• 30 billion makes a millenium

P. S. The list at the top is an embedded Google spreadsheet. I'm not sure whether embedding a list from a spreadsheet is worthwhile. It's great if that spreadsheet is going to get updated. If that happens, the blog post will show the new stuff, but I don't think that's going to happen here. The problem with embedding the spreadsheet is having to manually adjust the height and width parameters to show all of the data and nothing else. As you can see, there is still some white space on the right side and the bottom. I probably went back and forth a dozen times between the html and Blogger's preview. Pain in the neck. The other way is to just take a screenshot and embed it as an image. That has its own set of hoops to jump through, but I am familiar with them.

P. P. S. Kind of funny that everyone uses the same time standard of seconds, minutes and hours. The second is kind of universal - it's a heartbeat. The minutes and hours part though, I wonder where it came from. I suspect it came from European clock makers during the Renaissance (Bayou, I'm looking at you), but who knows? Maybe they got it from Chinese clock makers a zillion years ago. Someone should investigate.

P. P. P. S. Editing a spreadsheet to get it to 'look' like you want takes me a lot of fiddling around, but Google does offer lots of options. I know how to find most of what I want, changes appear immediately, you don't have to go look at a 'preview', and it's useful for things besides lists.

Linux Time Zone Problems

Linux Mint Timezone Dialog Box

More pictures to go with my Linux Forum questions.

Keeping Time

My own Discworld "Vetinari Clock"
Inspired by a comment on a Reddit joke.

When I was in high school there was a wall clock in each classroom. The clocks were all controlled by a master controller in the office. After school the power was shut down and the clocks stopped. In the morning, the power is turned on, and the master controller pulses all the clocks rapidly until they caught up to the correct time. At any rate, that was the story I heard. Now that I think about it, they could have just stopped the clocks at 6PM and then resumed at 6AM and it would have accomplished the same thing.

It seems like an awfully involved system for keeping the clocks running on time. I suppose the one advantage it has is that if there is a power failure, you only have to update the time on the master clock. You don't have to go around to all the classrooms and set the time on each clock individually. It might have been an IBM system. It sounds like something they would do.

Second

George Washington talking about musket balls and bullets.

 Came across the above picture on Facebook and I got to wondering when the second was invented (discovered? when people realized there was such a thing?). Ask dot com provides an answer:

The international unit of the second was first described by the Greco-Egyptian mathematician Claudius Ptolemy in his work "Almagest" around 150 C.E. He defined the second, or second-minute, as one-sixtieth of a minute.  The second was not used in timekeeping, however, until the development in the 17th century of the first mechanical clocks that could track this unit of time. Marin Mersenne, a French mathematician, developed a pendulum clock that could track one second via the pendulum's swing.

17th Century? That would be the 1600's, and a hundred years later the race of technology was in full swing.

Ptolemy (I pronounce it Tolemy, drop the P in the bit bucket), I think I've heard of him, although since they specified a first name, maybe there's more than one. Just checked, apparently no, there is only the one:

Claudius Ptolemy (circa AD 100 – c. 170) was a Greco-Egyptian writer, known as a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. - Wikipedia, more or less.

". . . poet of a single epigram . . ."? Is that even a legal construct? I would have no trouble with it if it was phrased like this:  ". . . author of a single epigram . . .". Guess I've never heard poet used that way. Still don't like it. And an 'epigram'? That's just "a short poem, especially a satirical one, having a witty or ingenious ending."

Just what was that epigram? Here you go, courtesy J J O'Connor and E F Robertson:

Well do I know that I am mortal, a creature of one day.
But if my mind follows the winding paths of the stars
Then my feet no longer rest on earth, but standing by
Zeus himself I take my fill of ambrosia, the divine dish.

P.S. Phrase in full swing "in total effect or operation" (1560s) perhaps is from bell-ringing. - Online Etymology Dictionary