ThinkGeek is selling a WiFi alarm clock
ThinkGeek is selling a WiFi alarm clock that donates money to an organization you hate every time you hit the snooze bar. I believe this is some sort of joke, but what an idea! (via magnetbox)
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kottke.org posts about time
Temporal anomalies in time travel movies, an
Temporal anomalies in time travel movies, an investigation of how time travel is represented in movies like Donnie Darko, 12 Monkeys, and Back to the Future. (via joshua)
How to think about the scale of
How to think about the scale of human history: “Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., one the United States’ great historians, is less than two lifetimes removed from a world where the United States did not exist. Through Mr. Schlesinger, you’re no more than three away yourself. That’s how short the history of our nation really is. Not impressed? It’s only two more life spans to William Shakespeare. Two more beyond that, and the only Europeans to see America are those who sailed from Greenland. You’re ten lifetimes from the occupation of Damietta during the fifth crusade. Twenty from the founding of Great Zimbabwe and the Visigoth sack of Rome. Make it forty, and Theseus, king of Athens, is held captive on Crete by King Minos, the Olmecs are building the first cities in Mexico, and the New Kingdom collapses in Egypt.”
A man outfitted his family minivan with
A man outfitted his family minivan with high-precision cesium clocks to demonstrate to his kids that they gained 22 nanoseconds of vacation time on their mountain camping trip than they would have at a lower altitude.
Daylight saving change and computer systems
Not too many people are paying attention, but the Energy Policy Act of 2005 lengthened daylight saving time by four weeks in the US. Instead of beginning the first Sunday of April and running through the last Sunday in October, daylight saving time will now stretch from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November. The Washington Post has an article today about the change and what impact it might have on automated systems:
The change takes effect this year — on March 11 — and it has angered airlines, delighted candy makers and sent thousands of technicians scrambling to make sure countless automated systems switch their clocks at the right moment. Unless changed by one method or another, many systems will remain programmed to read the calendar and start daylight saving time on its old date in April, not its new one in March.
The article mentions that older Microsoft products like Windows XP SP1 and Windows NT4 might require manual updates and Daring Fireball has had a few updates about how the switch effects Mac users, including this piece at TidBITS. But what about everything else? Is the version of Movable Type I’m using going to make the adjustment? What about Wordpress? Perl? Ruby? PHP? Java? Linux? I’m sure the current versions of all these programs and languages address the issue, but are there fixes and patches for those running old versions of Perl on their server?
If you’ve got any information about programs, applications, and languages affected by the change and how to address the problem, leave a comment on this thread. I’ll update the post as information comes in.
A 2000 year-old Greek computer accurately tracked the
A 2000 year-old Greek computer accurately tracked the motion of the sun, the irregular orbit of the moon, and predicted lunar eclipses. “Remarkably, scans showed the device uses a differential gear, which was previously believed to have been invented in the 16th century. The level of miniaturisation and complexity of its parts is comparable to that of 18th century clocks.”
Beautiful-looking 2007 calendar designed by Paula Scher and
Beautiful-looking 2007 calendar designed by Paula Scher and her team at Pentagram.
Every year, my friend Leslie does an
Every year, my friend Leslie does an online Advent calendar (she’s #1 on Google for “advent calendar”). This year, she’s asking for people (like you!) to submit their favorite holiday stories for use with the calendar.
Physicists at the University of Washington are
Physicists at the University of Washington are hoping to use entangled photons to send information back in time. “Here’s where it gets weird.”
Happy birthday, universe
According to the Ussher-Lightfoot Calendar, today is the 6,009th birthday of the universe. Based on James Ussher’s interpretation of the Bible, God created “the heaven and the earth” on October 23, 4004 BC. Happy birthday, everything!
Note: I’m doing Mr. Ussher’s precise chronology a disservice by fudging the Julian calendar date that he derived with the Gregorian calendar we now use. For that, I apologize.
More and more people are using their
More and more people are using their mobile phones to tell time instead of watches. Telling time has always been the #1 function I use on my phone.
The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society
The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society recently included a report on the 28-hour day. “There are apparently plenty of advantages to switching to a 28-hour day, including four-day work weeks, fewer daily chores, longer weekends.” This diary of someone who lives a 28-hour day is interesting.
Clever McDonald’s sundial billboard. “The billboard features
Clever McDonald’s sundial billboard. “The billboard features a real sundial whose shadow falls on a different breakfast item each hour until noon, when the shadow of the McDonald’s arches are dead center.”
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
I know I’m going to get mail about my five-star rating for this movie, but it cannot be helped. One summer when I was a kid, a friend and I watched Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure — no joke — every single day for a span of 2 months. I still know every line by heart, the timing, inflection, everything. If there were a Broadway production of this movie, I could slide effortlessly into the role of either Bill S. Preston, Esq. or Ted Theodore Logan, no rehearsal needed.
In my high school physics class my senior year, we had to do a report on something we hadn’t learned about in class — which, I discovered when I got to college, was a lot — and I did mine on time travel. I went to our small school library and read articles in Discover and Scientific American magazines about Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, quantum mechanics, causality, and wormholes. To illustrate the bit about wormholes, I brought in my well-worn VHS tape of Bill and Ted’s (a dub of a long-ago video rental) and showed a short clip of the phone booth travelling through space and time via wormhole. I got a B+ on my presentation. The teacher told me it was excellent but marked me down because it was “over the heads” of everyone in the class…which I thought was completely unfair. How on earth is Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure over anyone’s head?
Jim Holt asks Freeman Dyson, Lawrence Krauss,
Jim Holt asks Freeman Dyson, Lawrence Krauss, Ed Witten and other in trying to figure out how the universe will end. Further reading: Time Without End by Freeman Dyson, Frank Tipler’s Omega Point theory, and The Physics of Extra-Terrestrial Civilizations by Michio Kaku.
Discover Magazine on a prototype of the
Discover Magazine on a prototype of the fascinating 10,000-year clock being built by Danny Hillis and The Long Now Foundation. Here’s more info on the prototype and some photos from its launch party.
Reap is an art project “exploring the
Reap is an art project “exploring the notion of marking and capturing time: time as memory, as process, as moments, as metamorphoses and metaphors”. I like the apple rotting one. (thx susan)
Streetclock: using building shadows and road markers as urban sundials
Streetclock: using building shadows and road markers as urban sundials.
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