Nuclear Crisis Stopped Time In Japan

angry tapir writes "The problems at Japan's Fukushima-1 nuclear plant have had an unexpected impact on the country's ability to keep time: a transmitter that sends the national time signal to many thousands of clocks and watches has been forced offline making the timepieces a little less reliable than usual."

Comments

And?

[mirix]

Good thing there is still GPS, NTP, etc.

Worst case a few clocks have to fall back to quartz and lose a couple seconds a day, no?

Re:And?

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

That's what I've been wondering. With constant GPS signal all over the place, what do we need land-based atomic clock synchronisation for?

You put all of your eggs in one basket, and sooner or later that basket is going to be wiped out by a tsunami/quake.

If a tsunami or quake takes out GPS satellites in orbit 20km above the surface of the Earth I think accurate time-keeping will be the least of anyone's worries.

This site has really jumped the shark

[slyborg]

I know it's late, and I think this may have been intended as humorous, but really, guys? Has it come to this?

Re:This site has really jumped the shark

[discord5]

I know it's late

The Japanese currently sure don't... HAR HAR HARHAR

Has it come to this?

Sadly yes. The site does tend to more fluff, slashvertising, idle shit and biased politics articles than anything really interesting. I'm betting that by 2012 we'll have videos of cats on here.

Perhaps the new dysfunctional slashdot design should've clued most of us in that we should be leaving for something new.

Re:Caesium clock versus wild Caesium

[shentino]

Actually this is good if it disrupts the microsecond arbitrage in Wall Street.

Media idiocy

[VendettaMF]

This is about as accurate, realistic, rational and un-hyped a headline as here has yet been regarding the entire nuclear incident...

Unanswered questions

[Pesticidal]

So I RTFA and am left wondering why the engineers needed to power down the transmitter just because they were forced to abandon it. I would have presumed it would be controlled by computers and not rely on humans regularly hitting a button LOST-style. Also, I presume the differences in transmission frequency between the two halves of Japan is related to the separate power mains frequencies?

Re:Worst headline ever.

[captainpanic]

Not only did time not stop, but the clocks didn't even stop. They just aren't being synchronized anymore. Oh no!

In Japan, a country that considers a train late if it arrives more than 20 seconds later than scheduled, that's pretty bad.

Re:Worst headline ever.

[frozentier]

I have a hunch that their perspective has changed somewhat in the past month or so.

Re:Worst headline ever.

[AmiMoJo]

Indeed, due to reception issues it would be highly unwise to rely on a radio time broadcast for accuracy in important situations. You can have a mix of time sources (GPS, NTP, RDS etc.) but basically you need a reasonably accurate clock for when they are unavailable. Fortunately modules with better than 10 seconds/month are extremely cheap.

I got back from Japan on Sunday, there did not seem to be any time related problems. I didn't even know about it until this story.

Re:Worst headline ever.

[drinkypoo]

THANK YOU. Last time I pointed out Japan's high suicide rate I was modded down. It's real, and it's a real consequence of a high-pressure lifestyle. Japan is to life what Survivor is to television. The weakest links get voted off the island... forcibly. Emotional and mental abuse are real kinds of abuse.