These things help me to remember my past or discover the past of others. Every object has a history. What’s the difference between an everyday object and an antique? It’s really just the passage of time or sentimental memories that give things more value to us. A pocketknife or a keychain could be unmemorable—unless it belonged to a beloved uncle who passed away. Then maybe it means more or brings up memories. That’s why family heirlooms exist.
I’m also an avid collector, a hobby which also relates to time. I love bits of ephemera, such as old restaurant menus, unique cereal boxes, movie/concert ticket stubs, and found photographs. I like board games, toys, and other objects related to TV, movies, and other pop culture.
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I enjoy creating experiences for people. I’ve been in bands and other performances and strive to produce interesting art. I’ve created themed food events and puzzle hunts.
Happy New Year!
As primary standards improve, researchers must develop better ways of getting time out to industry and the public. Things such as GPS, mobile phone communications, and time-stamping stock market transactions require the use of precise time.
By measuring and comparing all these atomic clocks, we create a clock ensemble. You wouldn’t want to have just one clock keeping time for the whole country, so we use a weighted average of the clocks for the best possible stability.
My topics are usually vaguely related to something else happening that evening, but I never announce the topics ahead of time. Our brains remember the unexpected. So even if people don’t like it, they will remember it, even if just to complain about it the next day! Most of the projects I work on are about subverting or going beyond people’s expectations—which is what makes them interesting or memorable.
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Sometimes I “perform” PowerPoint presentations as an opening act at concerts. This is funny because people aren’t expecting it. I’ve done talks on conspiracy theories, bloodhounds, ossuaries (rooms or containers where bones of dead people are placed), and more.
It’s hard to grasp, but a nanosecond is one billionth of a second. Think about the speed of light—it travels about 1 foot in a nanosecond!
A millisecond is one-thousandth of one second, and a microsecond is a millionth of a second.
Innovation
Auld Lang ‘Time’
Welcoming the new year as a time expert
At the NIST Time and Frequency Division, to produce the official time of day, we begin by defining the duration of the second. This is actually quite complex and involves a lot of interesting science.
So, if you turn on a flashlight, that light will have traveled a foot away from the flashlight in a nanosecond—that’s inconceivably fast.
Like a lot of people, I do think about resolutions and what I want to accomplish in the new year. It’s kind of arbitrary when you think about it. But this is when our calendar rolls over, so it’s a moment for folks to reflect on the past and imagine the future.
Published Dec. 28, 2023, on NIST.
We actually monitor them every nanosecond of every day, not just on New Year’s Eve. We have the duty to uphold the official U.S. time. There are many ways we get this time to the public, which we call “distributing” the correct time. We send out the time via satellite, radio signals, telephone lines, through internet protocols, and our web clock at time.gov.
Memories play a large role in how we perceive the passage of time. Our brains categorize and store what seems significant and flush out the repetitive or unimportant day-to-day activities. (This is why you may sometimes struggle to remember what you ate yesterday or whether you locked the door.)
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The most stable clocks get the most “weight” mathematically in the average. Thus, if a clock starts to show drift or has other problems, it gets less weight, so it doesn’t affect the average. The output of this time scale is Coordinated Universal Time for the United States, known as UTC (NIST). We contribute our clock and time scale data to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM). Our time is a part of the worldwide weighted average, which is called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
There are studies about how our perception of time changes as we get older. Each passing day, month, or year is a smaller sliver of your total life the older you get. When you’re a kid, a year is a significant portion of your life. At 80 years old, one year makes up a tiny fraction of your life and experiences.
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Something I find fascinating is our perception of the rate of time. Some days (and years!) go by quickly, and some drag on. When we think back to the past, even distant memories are sometimes clear, and some recent memories have already faded away.
While people around the country are preparing champagne and getting ready to watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve, I’m closely monitoring our clocks at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
We’re always working on better and better atomic clocks for future definitions of the second. But we also have our primary standard clocks for the current definition. These are cesium fountain clocks that measure the second by tuning themselves to the precise frequency of microwaves that are absorbed by cesium-133 atoms. We use the primary standard clocks to calibrate many commercially available atomic clocks.
Thanks,
Quality Digest
منبع: https://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/innovation-article/auld-lang-time-011624.html
Time.gov lets you see the official U.S. time in multiple time zones at once. It actually uses your computer clock to measure the round-trip delay of the request to the NIST server so it can display the correct time on your screen.
There are also many important users who need accurate time but only within milliseconds. For time at this level, we have the Internet Time Service (ITS), where people can synchronize computers and other equipment or devices to our internet servers. This is built into most computer operating systems. Your computer accesses this information automatically, so you’ve probably used this service without even realizing it.
