DailyDirt: Time, Time, Time. See What's Become Of..

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

With the Apple Watch available now, maybe more people will be interested in wearing fancy watches again -- instead of just relying on their phones. Fancy watches once focused on telling time with extreme accuracy, but then digital watches made it really cheap to keep accurate time that was more than "good enough" for most folks. It used to be annoying to need to adjust clocks for daylight savings and power outages, but as more and more clocks are connected to the internet (except for ovens and some cheap alarm clocks), we barely need to think about how to change the time on a clock (who owns a VCR anymore?). Check out these links on accurate time keeping.

• There's a new atomic clock that's three times as accurate as the last most accurate clock -- losing less than 1 second in 15 billion years. The universe hasn't even been around for 15 billion years, and this clock probably won't last anywhere near that long either. Still, it's nice to have a clock that can measure time dilation effects and other weird phenomena. [url]
• John Harrison designed a clock in the 1700s that was accurate to a second over 100 days -- using a pendulum mechanism. Harrison wasn't able to build a working version of this clock, (and people thought he was crazy when he claimed he could) but modern clockmakers have constructed one from his designs -- and it works. [url]
• The 26th leap second is scheduled to be added to some clocks on June 30th -- at 11:59:60pm. Try not to rely on any computers that might not be able to handle this leap second, if you can. Or join the movement trying to abolish the leap second entirely, but that probably won't happen until 2018. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: accuracy, atomic clock, clocks, john harrison, leap second, pendulum clock, time, watches