Slashdot Mirror
Atomic Clock Turns 50
karvind writes "BBC has an interesting story on the 50th birthday of atomic clocks. The first accurate caesium atomic clock was developed at the NPL in 1955 by Dr Louis Essen. And after 5 decades In September the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) used computer chip fabrication techniques to make a small atomic clock. The final development should see a battery-operated system about the size of a sugar lump. NIST also has a page on history of atomic clocks"
It's a good thing we had atomic clocks so we could be sure it was really 50 years!
first post.
A beryllium atomic clock...just what the Doctor ordered!
Jelly baby?
^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Lump of sugar has to be the oddest comparison ever...
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
Sugar Lump?
I used to be obsessed with accurate clocks, still am for my servers, but after awhile its all relative anyway ;)
The more you know, the less you understand.
Does your girlfriend know you call her that?
(And use her as a unit of measurement?)
"The final development should see a battery-operated system about the size of a sugar lump."
"DO NOT EAT iAtomicClock"
The atomic clock turned 49.9999999999999999999999 today!
;)
Congratulations
liqbase
It seems that more and more of everything is sync'd with this. My clock radio at home auto-updates, clock on the wall, the cellphones, my Linux and Mac PC's and cable box.
Only thing left are the clocks with a single AA battery on the wall, and at some point they are going to use the pervasive WWVB time signal that is broadcast from Colorado and operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology
This technology has really come a long way and is deeply embedded within our lives. Especially if you consider that before the atomic clock, time varied considerably between different locales.
Newsfollow.com
and we still don't have time travel. What a shame.
That article is not precise! The atomic clock is 50.00000100121412235901293409234 years old as I'm writing this.
You'll have the most accurate caffine high ever.
...atomic clocks are old enough to get classified as antiques & collectibles. Kids with ultra-wristwatches that tell your exact location by relativity effect at walking speed will laugh and laugh. You will be able to by them as cheap gifts for little kids at the $2,000,000,000,000 shop without a second thought.
thank you for ore abilty to micro manage our lves
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
How the hell do the British see see-zee-umm in that? Tsai-sai-umm?
Four scientists, as they flip the switch on their new invention ...
... ...
#1: Gee, Ed, it looks like it works
#2: Bob, you're right! It's counting! We did it!
#1: It seems to be right on, let's fire up the chronotaph
#3: Already there, Bob, I have a solid register, five-nines. I started the paper before you hit the button.
#1: Good thinking, Stan. This is one for the record books!
#2: This is a clock for your ass, Ed! I guess we should set it now.
#4: Okay guys (looks at watch) what have you got? I'm showing a quarter past two.
"As net data is split in data streams and reassembled, for instance, the timing has to correct at the point of re-assembly.
If not, whatever data has been sent - voice packets in VoIP net phone calls for example - will come out garbled."
Did anyone else laugh as they read this? The writer of this article is unaware of sequence numbers... (and thinks that a timestamp is placed on each packet instead.) Wow. But this could also work with the computer's internal clock... though then all routing devices would have to be initialised to the same time. But I digress...
Just turned fifty (give or take ten seconds.)
because without NTP, we might as well be using sundials.
...if nobody was actually measuring the time? I say zero and fifty years concurrently.
After 50 years the first atomic clock will have lost, what, a few thousands of a second?
This is a question that must get asked a lot, and I wasn't able to find an answer (casually searching) on the gov website.
How did they figure out how to set the clock initially? Thanks.
Seriously... how do you set the time on one of them?
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
If it was running winzdoz?! Off byu 21 years evvery second laffo?!
50 years from now will we be talking about the birthday of the subatomic clock?
sometimes you will read about how the most accurate clock in the world is accurate to within 1 second every 30 million years or so. if it is already the most accurate clock, how would they know this?
Anyone see that article a couple of weeks ago in New Scientist about Strontium atoms held in standing waves generated by 6 lasers? Mental. A 50 time more accurate (or something).
After 50 years the first atomic clock will have lost, what, a few thousands of a second?
it could just as easily have gained a few thousanths of a second. It was only the first one, so it could have been pretty inaccurate.
Tag lost or not installed.
... time synchronises with you!
Anonymous Coward
...the worlds first atomic wristwatch.
The American government, rightfully, has condemned the Chinese military buildup, which threatens all of Southeast Asia.
So, most of the non-live TV shows are on time. It is probably impossible. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Fine but what nanosecond does its birthday roll over?
This means we can rest easy knowing that there will be NO accidental same sex marriages between Tyrannosaurs!
Call the White House and Tom Delay.
Everyone knows that the CIA hackers are 31337 and hack people ALL the time! They even hack into computers that aren't even connected to the 'net! I once saw this hacker and he hacked a system so much that it EXPLODED and it KILLED like a million people! And that was just with his pinky. And I knew right then he had to be a CIA hacker d00d. And I asked him. And he hacked my laptop which was OFF and closed AND HAD no battery! And he did it just by looking at it and he scowled and he turned around and then he hacked a park bench and then digitally vanished. And when I opened my laptop it said "I'm a CIA hacker d00d and am 31337. Tell n0 0n3." Oh crap... ,mnb,b4, #$$# NO CARRIER>>>
But what about the NSA?
An acronym of ADD could lead to great jokes about... ... hey wanna go ride bikes?
49.999999999999999999923409
Table-ized A.I.
I guess I'm just not getting all this timekeeping stuff. I've been aroud for over 1,308,744,000+ seconds and I still don't _feel_ any older...
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
and all the staff had a surpise birthday party for the bi-centinary birthday.
Although the surpise was too much for dear old atomic, and his ticker stopped ticking. He was rushed to hospital where he had a pacemaker installed. He has lost several hours which officials have decided to relocate him to a warmer climate on a different timezone to make up for the difference.
The operation and pacemaker will not shorten the expected lifespan of atomic.
Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
Now, tell me exactly when it first became operational, down to the precise NANOSECOND!
You're being left in the dust, using an inferior operating system.
Even then, finding medullary bone is a long shot, Schweitzer said. First the dinosaur has to be an ovulating female. It also has to die before it has finished laying eggs and has to be fossilized. Finally, that fossil has to be found by humans.
That last part is certainly a long shot for any bones lying undiscovered in a museum somewhere.
GOD DAMN YOU SONS OF BITCHES! How hard is it to say, "one cubic centimeter"?
Anyway, isn't time to update the measurement of a "second" from the cesium atom? 1/9,192,631,770 is pretty vague in this day and age. Especially when france is "responsible" for all the "standards", and Paris is a city of change.
I say go for cobolt-60. Hell, it updates itself enough for Paris, with or without Joan.
Does it run Linux?
Maybe they kidnap them from Japan.
See for example their history of doing the same to acquire knowledge about the outside world:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2087627/
The Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists other nuclear clock
Uh huh, that's what it wants us to think....
"This food is problematic."
They might just "tick".. but you want them to tick at the right moment. otherwise you'd have two atomic clocks both accurate to themselves but off by as much as a second-- assuming you've got them synced to each other within a second or so..
With latency in relating the time from one atomic clock to another (I'd bet even the speed of light would factor in when syncing a new atomic clock to an old one), I wonder how they do it. They'd have to be very, very, confident in the accuracy of the lag. I also wonder how they set the first one in the 1940s.. ie, what did they use as a reference?
The atomic clock tells us what time it is, so no longer does time dictate what time it is, the atomic clock does. So, of course we never really now what time it really is. Especially because it's all relative to the Earth's orbit around the sun which, for all we know, could be decaying.
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
There is a project to serve NTP round-robin from a number of servers. You can use this pool thusly with ntpd:
server pool.ntp.org
If you live in Canada or the US you can even do:
server north-america.pool.ntp.org
Read more at:
http://www.pool.ntp.org/
The CIA? That blows any sort of credibility in the report. The CIA doesnt run "hakcers", the Department of Defense does, HQ'd on an Airforce base. It was publicised back in April in this article
There have been a number of other projects to drill deep into the Earth's crust, though none has succeeded in reaching the mantle, as this Japanese team is trying to do. Some of the more well-known ones:
Another poster already provided the wikipedia page for Project Mohole available.
This Japanese project is going to drill through the sea floor in the Pacific, in a spot where the crust is thin, which will hopefully allow them to reach the mantle in only 7 km, under 2.5 km of water. For comparison: the previous record seafloor drill was only 2.1 km. So they've definitely got their work cut out for them.
My God folks, how is this news? Is anyone really surprised that a militant nation engages in information warfare?
The mantle IS NOWHERE NEAR the center of the earth. More /. titling sensationalism.
Still, drilling even 6 miles down is quite a feat
Does it run linux?
I hope they don't wake up some million year old creature that then terrorises Tokyo and makes all the girls scream!
"Iraq has the 4th largest army in the world". That's what they kept telling us before the first Iraq war.
Now North Korea has an almost as big army of hackers as US...
Pattern or coincidence?
something that doesn't exist.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Why can't they be like Debian? Those CDs, you can pass on to your children and they're still current.
I thought Intel wasn't around fifty years ago...
So does this mean that if we are able to find suitable water deposits but either not enough life for it to foster or none at all, that we would be able to plant certain bacteria that would be able to start a green house effect to vent off ice caps into atmosphere and "seed" life on Mars?
Earth Microbes placed on Mars appear to be stuck in a sand dune.
This is serious. Somebody should stop them. Otherwise, they will pop the planet like a balloon, causing the insides to gush out into space, and the Earth's crust to fragment and fly off in all directions. Those parts of the crust left intact will shrink to a small fraction of their former size (just like a ballon's skin), once the air is let out of the Earth. On the plus side, traveling from point A to point B will take much less time, once the crust has shrunk, but point A and point B will themselves be much smaller. Houses in the suburbs will start to look like houses in the city, i.e., scrunched up against each other with small to non-existent back yards. No back yards! Where will yuppies hold their barbeques? My god, my god! We have to stop them before they pop the planet!
$20-$30 seems fair... I'm sure they won't resell them. Snort.
Only North Koreans need to know what time it is.
Hail Cowboy Neal.
I mean, it could be lying about its age. If you disagree, what clock can you consult for arbitration?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
You point is completely true - but the money is not reobtained from consumers, but from savings made in the repair shop. Apple (like other electronics companies) state in their warrenties they can replace defective parts with refurbs, which are obviously cheaper than new items (example - my battery replacement they gave me for my iBook was a refurb). Thus, the cost of repair is reduced, and that's where the money is recouped.
There are about a billion ways you can replace the battery for about $50, so I'm not sure what the big deal is here. Even Apple will do it for $99.
Since a new iPod with similar functionality is $250-$299 (depending on how important extra storage space is to you), I'd say battery replacement is normally going to be worthwhile.
Unless you have an iPod broken for some other reason, I think the recycling is a bum deal.
D
The story makes it seem like this is a great deal but in fact it is a terrible ripoff. Search for "broken ipod". For example "ipod 15 gig 3g 3rd gen broken" with what appears to be a broken hard drive is at $82.01 after 8 bids and with 5 and a half hours left.
The cracks about "why not just sell it on ebay" aside, this is a very good program.
Manufacturing computers and consumer electronics is a messy process, and the rapid speed of upgrades ensures that many tons of computer equipment are entering landfills regularly. Many of the components in computers are quite toxic, and probably a few other manufacturers have recycling programs in place for computers. Many of them require you to pay the company to take your old, beat up jonx.
If you are designing a system for high reliability, under temperature extremes and such (military environments for example) underclocking is the way to go - you can minimize power and heat loads as well as potentially avoid timing instabilites that occur when you push a processor to the performance margins.
Wasn't this thrown off by the tsunami?
I think it is somewhat useful information. While most people are thinking about how much faster you can process, many of us are looking to reduce the noise of fans blowing. I recall when 800MHz was a fantastic speed... hell, for that matter, 300MHz was pretty nice too depending on how far back you go.
And are we really using all of those cycles? Not really. Right now, a system's performance (IMHO) is largely the responsibility of the quality of RAM, Video and system board stuff. After all, what "feels" fast must be fast. If I've got a slow hard drive, then it's a slow system and if I can accellerate the video, then it's a slow system. What good is 4GHz if you've got a slow everything else... and by the same token, if you've got a fast everything else, a 2GHz processor is probably plenty.
Use CrystalCPUID covers HP zv5000/zv6000 and Compaq R3000/R4000 notebooks.
They have measured the (absolute) celcius temperature of a well-cooled system, without quoting the ambient temperature. Then, concluding that the temperature hasn't droppped much, they assume the power hasn't dropped much.
The correct measurement is the *difference* in temperature between the CPU and the ambient air. Power dissipation is linearly proportional to this.
Thank you for letting me share this old-timer drivelling on slashdot./p
I'll take $30 for something that has a dead and irreplaceable battery. Although it would make a pretty snazzy paperweight.
Ignoring the fact that iPod batteries are replacable, when a hard-drive based iPod is no longer viable as a player due to the battery charge it is still quite useful as an external HD.
Microsoft operating systems and software accomplish this without all the work.
They listed the drop in temperature from 33.5 to 26.9 as a 20% drop. However, they didn't mention the ambient temperature. If you take 20 degrees, then this drop is more like 50%. That would also mean that it was consuming well under half the power. (I'm assuming watts->degrees is exponential.)
As a secondary matter, the person who got me interested in BSD, as a rule, made his servers with whatever was the cheapest AMD-K6, underclocked to 350MHZ. Bulletproof boxes with long lifetimes. I'm sure there are still some churning out the bits around this town.
I was curious to find that 5th picture, talking about using insects to control a green swirl of something that appeared somewhere.
I wish they could visit our lake. Last year it had a huge crop of lemna, shown here
In the old days, it was common to use "flying clocks" to synchronize atomic clocks around the world. A flying clock is just a portable version of an atomic clock, with a rechargeable battery for its power supply. Someone would take the flying clock to the place where the primary time standard was maintained, synchronize it with the primary time standard, and hop on a commercial airplane flight to the field site. When they arrived at the field site, they would synchronize the local atomic clock with the flying clock. I've seen a flying clock that was built into a medium sized suitcase. The clock usually had its own seat and airplane ticket while traveling. Today, for most applications it is simpler to install a GPS receiver that is designed for time/frequency distribution.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
1. Build giant probe to drill to the center of the earth
2. Arm the probe with nuclear weapons
3. Hold the world hostage for... ONE MILLION DOLLARS
4. Profit!
Already welcomed our Atomicly Synchronized Overlords 50 years ago.
According to the article, it doesn't appear there were any previous celebrations ... and in the BBC piece it doesn't say if the clock got to do anything for turning 50. I climbed a mountain on my 40th birthday - someone ought to throw a party for the poor old clock! ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
I am extremely glad to see "underclocking" gaining in popularity.
I design systems that run applications across hundreds or thousands of servers. Many of my applications are bound by items such as connections, long before processor becomes a bottleneck.
As a case example, I will have an application that utilizes 55% of the proc across two processors. I use two processors to keep response time down (multi threads). Intel gives me a new processor. I get to spend more money to power the new processor, but now I get the amazing advantage of the new, faster, more power hungry machine now being 30% utilized.
More money down the drain, but I am not getting much for it. The worst abuse of this is static content web servers. I run into connection issues and network latency issues long before I run out of processor.
With the new HE processors from AMD, I can turn down the processor clock and cut my power consumption by as much as 50% across the board. This translates into real savings on power and cooling infrastructure.
Articles like this make me look forward to the 1960's..
They were really advanced.. and we're lame - we just have Internets.
Holy smokes, they can build spaceships, land men on the moon, but they can't take an inventory? What else do they have laying around?
If they want to underclock a 4000+, they could just swap me my 3000+.. I wouldn't complain.
Maybe the point to be highlighted is one of judgement. If you're crossing a rope bridge, over an abyss, and, you think it's showing signs of giving way, do you sprint for the other side or do you go gingerly, testing as you go, looking for more proof of what's happening? In the first world, the infrastructure that maintains our lifestyle is not ruggedly robust, or, highly redundant. Redundancy as a concept is, historically, only yesterday's news. The internet is an example of an infrastructure built with redundancy in mind. So, if the biosphere is showing signs of change, do we hope for benign change and/or for science to sprint to the rescue? Sir Francis Bacon Will climate change force a parameter shift that will invite a runaway state? The concept of key species tells us that specific species are necessary to maintaining the ecology of an eco niche. Could climate change destroy key species and cause collapse of ecosystems. This brings on the old bogey man of the domino effect.
Change is inevitable, so it's really a matter of placing your bet on science as the ultimate super hero, or, do we begin to exercise caution now to mitigate against change. After all there's no place like home./p
Because they don't want you to know what they really found.
This does raise the question again about what Space exploration is for. With George W stating that its about going to the Moon, then Mars and putting people on planets this is a lesson in how easy it is to put people into Orbit (but how much more expensive to get to the moon, Gemini v Apollo).
With elements like Hubble being decomissioned despite its achievements, and a lack of long range probes being planned the question has to be asked.
Is NASA a marketing campaign for US Military "dominance" of earth and space. Or about futhering Mankind. In the 60s the president gave a target of something that just seemed right (landing on the moon). In the 21st Century the best we aim to achieve is... what JFK wanted us to do in the 60s.
Imagine what MIT, Berkley, Cambridge, Moscow, Paris and a bunch of other top Universities could do in terms of pushing human achievement forwards if they had the budget that NASA gets.
50.00000000000000000000014 years (with uncertanity +/-2 in the last decimal place)
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
My system is never idle. It runs seti@home and/or folding@home 24/7 in the background. So I don't think the power saving features will work for me if they depend on the processor being idle. I bought a Dell 500SC for home. It has been rock solid, but the fan is very noisy, and the DMA on the secondary IDE is busted (chipset bug). When I upgrade, I don't care about bleeding edge performance, I want it to be quiet. Wouldn't you know, after I bought the 500SC, Dell came out with the 400SC, which I've installed at several customers. That thing is quiet as a mouse. Sigh. I thought about switching and telling them, "See, 500 is better 400!"
No, most likely they did. From the article:
Other historical treasures found in the room include old film canisters, one flown shuttle main landing tire, electrical equipment, and various miscellaneous boxes.
Huh. Historical treasures, that just happened to be in a room which nobody said they had a key to. Huh.
Records show that official ownership of this suit was transferred by NASA to the Smithsonian Institution in 1983. The suit itself has now been returned to the Smithsonian.
Anyone else starting to realize that the stuff (which spans decades, completely different programs, and sections of NASA) didn't just get up and walk (either from the Smithsonian, or more likely, from other areas at NASA, never getting to the Museum) to a locked closet nobody said they had keys for?
Sounds to me like someone at NASA was building up their own private collection, and used a room they thought they had the only key to, not realizing there was a master key system in use./p
The USSR actually DID have a series of manned military space stations that orbited during the 1970s. It was known as the Almaz for military space stations. I mean, it even LOOKS sinister, painted black and all...
-
Lustre, a great Linux network filing system, is selling for quite extraordinary sums of money - which means it undoubtably has commercial value and interest. The mailing list is fairly active and they are even organizing international meetings to cover it. Not bad for a project that is GPLed and is sufficiently far off the mainstream as to be considered esoteric outside the clustering world.
However, that is exactly the point. Lustre IS esoteric, in many ways, and IS only really appealing to special interest groups, but is also unquestionably innovative and a commercial success. How on earth can you make a meaningful comparison of that with, say, Firefox that has zero commercial value, uses a lot of recycled components, but has triggered a massive level of awareness in both Open Source and software security?
The two are both extremely significant, but significant in vastly different ways, and both are different again from the impact of porting JFS and XFS, which have both revolutionized the way IBM and SGI look at the hardware and software markets.
So you have lots of different categories. But will those categories be meaningful? "Best new product" is a likely category, but is hardly informative and tells you nothing about how you would compare the vast range of different products that exist.
On the other hand, if you split things up by what they do, you'd almost end up with one category per product, so everyone would end up winning on something, making an award a meaningless achievement.
/p
What on Earth makes them think they are qualified to select the best Open Source Initiative of the year? Don't they own download.com, arguably the largest repository of crap-filled closed-source downloadables? This sounds like the Winston-Salem Environmental & Health awards...
The article is frustratingly vague. It sounds to me like the robot doesn't replicate itself but rather that Dr. Adrian Bowyer has created some type of system for replicating robot chasis. The picture clearly shows a plastic 'bot with attached motors, wiring, batteries, etc. From the information that the article gives, it seems like a human is still needed for the final construction. I wouldn't consider this self replicating because it is not autonomous.
The reason the suits looked like Gemini era suits was because the MOL program was based on Gemini technology.
A Titan IIIC booster with a 'Blue Gemini' atop would launch with the space station afixed, they would do their observation, then the Gemini would detach and land. Later missions could dock with the existing observation platform when feasible.
The launches would have taken place from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California. This is needed to efficiently put spacecraft into polar orbit without overflying populated land during boost.
A launch site was created at Vandenburg to handle manned spacecraft launches, but the program was cancelled as the article says. What it doesn't say is that the same complex was refurbished in the 1980s as part of the effort to launch the Space Shuttle into polar orbit for military missions. That program was cancelled as well (following the Challenger destruction).
For people interested in MOL, go check out the X-20 Dynasoar. It was a related program that would have had a reusable spaceplane 15 years before the shuttle.
At least they aren't powered by human blood.
It's apparently a robot that can make circuit boards, and that's it. There are about 50 million steps involved in making itself, this can do one of them.
Thx media hype, call me when something interesting happens.
We've had 3D printers for quite a while now which basically form shapes by laying down a thin layer of sand-like or metallic powder, followed by a thin layer of glue, etc. You then use compressed air to blow away the sand layers which don't have glue and voila... a 3D shape and quite sturdy. You can make some parts which are impossible using other methods.
However, I missed the part in the press release, er... story where they are self-assembling. Sure, you can have a machine feed in a design and print something out, but what about assembly? Yes it can print circuits, but does this thing add motors, insert batteries, or plug its power into the wall? And will it feed the newly created copy with the source of materials, etc. it needs to make another copy? Let me know when we get a machine which can create an copy of itself and, without any human intervention, that just-created copy makes another copy.
An anonymous reader writes ... good to see such explicit acknowledging of the work being done by the open source community.
Good to see people willing to stand up and openly support open source...
is that they were so busy looking at the rear hazcam that they didn't see the giant water trap right in front of them.
I bet there's some scientists who'll be wanting the rover to reverse back a bit - it looks like they've dug the deepest trench yet on Mars, and I wouldn't be surprised if they've already done risk assesments regarding getting the rover to peer in with its instruments... ;-)
This would be like Microsoft awarding a Freedom to Innovate award each year.
Rechargeable batteries cease to work. Solar panels get scratched and clogged by sand. Sand gets into the parts and joints. Did I mention this thing is basically sitting in a big pile of sand? Okay. Now did I mention that Mars, as a planet, is prone to really nasty windstorms?
Every second that passes is one second closer to the point at which this rover simply ceases to function. Until that point comes, we want to get absolutely as much use out of it as possible.
One part of the article that I think many slashdot readers will find interesting is near the bottom:
New here, aren't you?
I probably should have posted that as an AC.
So the question is: when is Palm going to fix/replace my Zire? It has two well-known problems:
<angry-rant>
Palm should have a better customer support but I suspect that the Harvard-CEO-type-of-mentality must dictate that its better to wait until users get organized and push a class action than just releasing a fix for software problems (point #2), because the latter would hurt the company's image (as if the class action wasn't bad enough).
<\angry-rant>/p
Good idea. I personally think they should've gone with a more Metroid Prime robot style, so that it could just roll like a ball, then when it got stuck it could unwind itself and start walking and hopping around. That'd be pretty entertaining as a battlebot too.
Half the posters here seem to be advocating fraud. Way to go guys.
Have you noticed the difference in the BBC and NIST history pages?
According to NIST the idea of Atomic Clocks was proposed in 1945 by Isidor Rabi at Columbia University, and 'announced' in 1949 at NIST.
According to the BBC the idea of Atomic Clocks was proposed by Lord Kelvin in 1879, and built at the NPL in 1955 by Louis Essen.
I wonder whether there is any more importance to the 1949 and 1952 dates in the NIST history, beyond the fact that they are before 1955?
I'm in Canada, and would love to have my buggered m105 replaced.
Night vs. Day.
South Korea is the most "connected" nation in the world, with some 80% of households having broadband, and the average broadband connection being 4 MBits/s.
North Korea, well, can hardly feed themselves.
Take a look at North Korea vs South Korea in this NASA "Earth at night" image
The country itself need not have enough bandwidth. Distributed DoS could take down a box using american zombie PCs. And let me tell you, there is no dearth of those. An attack from the inside of the network is perfectly possible - ever read Andromeda Strain
There have been a number of other projects to drill deep into the Earth's crust, though none has succeeded in reaching the mantle, as this Japanese team is trying to do. Some of the more well-known ones:
Another poster already provided the wikipedia page for Project Mohole available.
This Japanese project is going to drill through the sea floor in the Pacific, in a spot where the crust is thin, which will hopefully allow them to reach the mantle in only 7 km, under 2.5 km of water. For comparison: the previous record seafloor drill was only 2.1 km. So they've definitely got their work cut out for them.
Since aternatives keep up innovation, there is also a KDE 3.4 and such shiny new LiveCD http://www.t2-project.org/live/).
It even comes with D-BUS / HAL integration for auto mounting and equally perfect hardware detection.
As usual with the System Development Environment (SDE) T2, you can automatically rebuild it, optimized for your CPU - or even other architectures.
Has anyone noticed that their comments section (12 languages, 8 architectures)!
When the 1976 Viking experiments detected possible signs of life, one of the suspects was bacteria from Earth. Since it was believed that life wouldn't surive the trip to Mars, the validity of this hypothesis compared to the idea that the bacteria is Martian (or the idea that it was a false positive due to nonliving sources) has been the debate of scientists for a while. We'll have to wait until someone recovers the Viking probes to know the true source of that possible signature.
The cracks about "why not just sell it on ebay" aside, this is a very good program.
Manufacturing computers and consumer electronics is a messy process, and the rapid speed of upgrades ensures that many tons of computer equipment are entering landfills regularly. Many of the components in computers are quite toxic, and probably a few other manufacturers have recycling programs in place for computers. Many of them require you to pay the company to take your old, beat up jonx.
Totally off-topic, but I just got my first DVD burner, and I'm loving it. You should check out how cheap they've gotten -- I was surprised.
t egory=10
...
http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/Category.asp?Ca
The burn-any-format drives are less than $50, and media is $35/100. That's definitely getting down in the why-the-hell-not range, for me
In North America at least, the trend has been going largely in the opposite direction. We are seeing REforestation rather than DEforestation. This is in despite of an increasing population.
m l
It can be a little tough to find good data given all the bullshit flying around but here's a map that shows the amount of forest land in the US from 1620 onwards:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/gg96rpt/chap7.ht
A move to more densley packed cities is also a contributing factor to reforestation.
Article such as the one Zonk cited are a favorite of the hard left environmental movement. These 'studies' cherry pick data to paint an alarmist picture. The media usually swallow these article whole with little crtical thought. In the end, these distorted pictures don't do anything to help real environmental progress.
The story makes it seem like this is a great deal but in fact it is a terrible ripoff. Search for "broken ipod". For example "ipod 15 gig 3g 3rd gen broken" with what appears to be a broken hard drive is at $82.01 after 8 bids and with 5 and a half hours left.
It's about as self-replicating as a machine that connects to the web via its ethernet port, places an order for parts here, waits until the UPS web site says the parts have arrived and then emails its owner to tell it to assemble the parts sitting in the box on the front doormat.
The country itself need not have enough bandwidth. Distributed DoS could take down a box using american zombie PCs. And let me tell you, there is no dearth of those. An attack from the inside of the network is perfectly possible - ever read Andromeda Strain
Night vs. Day.
South Korea is the most "connected" nation in the world, with some 80% of households having broadband, and the average broadband connection being 4 MBits/s.
North Korea, well, can hardly feed themselves.
Take a look at North Korea vs South Korea in this NASA "Earth at night" image
The USSR actually DID have a series of manned military space stations that orbited during the 1970s. It was known as the Almaz for military space stations. I mean, it even LOOKS sinister, painted black and all...
Parent post (Re:Caesium) is about "Atomic Clock Turns 50"
:>
Three replies as I type this:
1. : "since knoppix uses a very cleverly hacked filesystem layout" ???
2. : " was curious to find that 5th picture, talking about using insects to control a green swirl". I think that belongs with Changing Planet Revealed In Atlas
3. "I'm sorry, but what qualification does CNET have to bestow open source software awards". CNET to Award Open Source Initiatives, anyone ?
Looks like Slashdot's a bit borked
Since aternatives keep up innovation, there is also a KDE 3.4 and such shiny new LiveCD http://www.t2-project.org/live/).
It even comes with D-BUS / HAL integration for auto mounting and equally perfect hardware detection.
As usual with the System Development Environment (SDE) T2, you can automatically rebuild it, optimized for your CPU - or even other architectures.
Uh, we found some stuff that was from a project that is public knowledge. The fact that the suits still exist is not news either; it is not like they throw those kinds of things out. I don't think they are biodegradable.
Also, how about adding some better links for contect? It took about 2 seconds to find this: http://www.deepcold.com/deepcold/dyna_main.html/a
The CIA? That blows any sort of credibility in the report. The CIA doesnt run "hakcers", the Department of Defense does, HQ'd on an Airforce base. It was publicised back in April in this article
The story makes it seem like this is a great deal but in fact it is a terrible ripoff. Search for "broken ipod". For example "ipod 15 gig 3g 3rd gen broken" with what appears to be a broken hard drive is at $82.01 after 8 bids and with 5 and a half hours left.
The cracks about "why not just sell it on ebay" aside, this is a very good program.
Manufacturing computers and consumer electronics is a messy process, and the rapid speed of upgrades ensures that many tons of computer equipment are entering landfills regularly. Many of the components in computers are quite toxic, and probably a few other manufacturers have recycling programs in place for computers. Many of them require you to pay the company to take your old, beat up jonx.
I was curious to find that 5th picture, talking about using insects to control a green swirl of something that appeared somewhere.
I wish they could visit our lake. Last year it had a huge crop of lemna, shown here
Maybe the point to be highlighted is one of judgement. If you're crossing a rope bridge, over an abyss, and, you think it's showing signs of giving way, do you sprint for the other side or do you go gingerly, testing as you go, looking for more proof of what's happening? In the first world, the infrastructure that maintains our lifestyle is not ruggedly robust, or, highly redundant. Redundancy as a concept is, historically, only yesterday's news. The internet is an example of an infrastructure built with redundancy in mind. So, if the biosphere is showing signs of change, do we hope for benign change and/or for science to sprint to the rescue? Sir Francis Bacon Will climate change force a parameter shift that will invite a runaway state? The concept of key species tells us that specific species are necessary to maintaining the ecology of an eco niche. Could climate change destroy key species and cause collapse of ecosystems. This brings on the old bogey man of the domino effect.
Change is inevitable, so it's really a matter of placing your bet on science as the ultimate super hero, or, do we begin to exercise caution now to mitigate against change. After all there's no place like home./p
In North America at least, the trend has been going largely in the opposite direction. We are seeing REforestation rather than DEforestation. This is in despite of an increasing population.
m l
It can be a little tough to find good data given all the bullshit flying around but here's a map that shows the amount of forest land in the US from 1620 onwards:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/gg96rpt/chap7.ht
A move to more densley packed cities is also a contributing factor to reforestation.
Article such as the one Zonk cited are a favorite of the hard left environmental movement. These 'studies' cherry pick data to paint an alarmist picture. The media usually swallow these article whole with little crtical thought. In the end, these distorted pictures don't do anything to help real environmental progress.
http://reprap.org/
This would make a better type of bot wars, building their weapons with available materials and blasting each other with them heh
It's about as self-replicating as a machine that connects to the web via its ethernet port, places an order for parts here, waits until the UPS web site says the parts have arrived and then emails its owner to tell it to assemble the parts sitting in the box on the front doormat.
The ironic thing about an atomic clock is that you have to have a computer to read the time. I saw one once at Kitt Peak National Observatory, and it was just like a server in a room without a terminal. No display, not even a digital display, to tell the time. They didn't even have an analog clock on the wall.
The USSR actually DID have a series of manned military space stations that orbited during the 1970s. It was known as the Almaz for military space stations. I mean, it even LOOKS sinister, painted black and all...
The country itself need not have enough bandwidth. Distributed DoS could take down a box using american zombie PCs. And let me tell you, there is no dearth of those. An attack from the inside of the network is perfectly possible - ever read Andromeda Strain
From the article: "The first atomic clock ... was born at the UK's National Physical Laboratory."
Well, the first -cesium- atomic clock was made at NPL, UK, which was certainly a major advance. But the FIRST ATOMIC CLOCK was built at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) which is now known as NIST, in the US. So I disagree with the BBC's presentation of the situation.
Check out http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/ for more info and history than what was linked in the original post on this topic.
The Big International Scientific Conference that got together to define a new time scale to replace GMT had no difficulty coming up with the name "Coordinated Universal Time", but deadlocked when it came time to decide between the English acronym (CUT) or the French one (TUC). So they decided to use the symbol UTC, which doesn't stand for anything.
Leap seconds are used to keep UTC in sync with the Earth's rotation. Since the Earth's rotation is steadily slowing down, UTC would drift away from any sensible time if it wasn't adjusted every now and then. So they add the occasional extra second to keep them in sync.
GPS time runs at the same rate as UTC, but has no leap seconds, and is currently 13 seconds different. People who navigate by the stars use UT1. Then there is the Terrestrial Dynamical Time that astronomers use, which is another matter entirely.
...laura
My dad, David W. Allan, worked with the Atomic clock at NIST until 1992 when he retired. The "Allan Variance" is an algorithm at the heart of international time-keeping.
He has continued his research on a tangent subject of a new unified field theory. He is in process of implementing some of his theories by way of ultra-precision positioning. You might find his theory worth review. AllansTIME.com
He also has passion in the subject of health. His solar home is likewise a hallmark of his forward thinking. http://allanstime.com/SolarHome/
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.