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

DailyDirt: Time Flies When You're...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are a lot of myths and aphorisms about the passage of time. A watched kettle never boils. Time flies when you're having fun. However, these observations could lead to some important discoveries about human psychology and how our brains perceive and remember various events in our lives. Does "proportionality theory" really explain why 8yo kids and 80yo senior citizens judge time differently? Here are just a few links on the topic of time.

• Does the perception of time really speed up as you get older? It depends on the time frame -- days and weeks may pass at a normal speed, but it's the years that seem to fly by. [url]
• The perception of time passing can be changed by emotions (fear seems to slow time down), disrupted routines and new experiences. Also, drugs that affect dopamine function in the brain (eg. Ritalin, Adderall and anti-psychotic drugs) can speed up or slow down how a person perceives time. [url]
• If the maximum sentence for criminals is life in prison, could we make the punishment worse by giving inmates drugs that make the time seem to pass more slowly? Obviously, there are some serious ethical questions about customizing punishments with technology, but it's an issue that should be debated as medicine comes up with ever more ways to extend human lifespans. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: aging, drugs, lifespan, perception, psychology, punishment, time

DailyDirt: Calibration Time, Come On!

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Not all clocks are created equal. Some clocks lose a few seconds every month. Others are connected to cell phone towers and are constantly updating their time displays. We've come a long way from the VCRs that blink 12:00. Here are just a few articles on how we're keeping track of every minute.

• Atomic clocks will be sooo "last second" when nuclear clocks start ticking. Instead of using excited electrons from a specified element to measure the passage of time, scientists will zap the nuclei of thorium atoms to create a clock that claims to drift by about 1 second in 200 billion years. [url]
• NIST has an interesting website on the history of time keeping. NIST also broadcasts shortwave signals and offers a phone-based service to deliver the current time within an accuracy of a few milliseconds. [url]
• [Warning: pdf link] In January 2012, there could be a redefined version of Coordinated Universal Time that eliminates any requirement to keep our time systems synchronized to the Earth's rotation -- and ditching the "leap second" among other artifacts. Computer: "Captain's log, stardate 41153.7. Our destination is planet..." [url]
• To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: clocks, leap seconds, nuclear clock, stardate, time
Companies: nist

Yes Means Yes

from the problems-with-permission-culture dept

Please don’t ask my permission to re-use my work. YOU ALREADY HAVE PERMISSION. Please copy, share, re-use, redistribute, edit, modify, sell, etc.


Asking permission wastes your time, and mine. You might not mind wasting your time. Many people think asking for permission is a “sign of respect.” But what about my time?

Information (including all of my work) is not scarce. Attention (time) is.

Emails get lost in spam filters. They get lost amid the hundreds of other emails in my inbox. I’ve been known to take vacations and actually get away from my computer for a few days – something I should be doing more often. So what happens if you don’t get any response to your permission request? Do you not reuse the work? A work that has been explicitly made Free, in the hope that you will reuse it? Not reusing the work harms the work, and harming a work is disrespectful. Delaying reusing the work likewise harms the work, in smaller increments.

Suppose a “respectful” email asking for permission which has already been explicitly granted doesn’t get caught in a spam filter or lost in some other glitch. Suppose it actualy makes it into my inbox. Now I am obligated to respond – the requester essentially said, “I’m not going to use this work unless you respond.” As “respectful” as this sounds, it places an unfair burden on me. The work, and any use of the work, should not be held hostage pending my checking and responding to email.

It is not “respectful” to make me do more, unnecessary work.

More importantly, asking permission is bad for the work itself. If you refuse to reuse the work unless I send you an email, you are blocking an expression or distribution of the work. How many days or weeks or months are you willing to put it off pending my ability to process email? Or worse, someone thinks it’s “respectful” to require me to sign papers and mail them back. Yes, this happens. I have such paperwork sitting right here, telling me that unless I sign it and mail it back, they won’t use the work they already have explicit permission to use. How is it “respectful” to make me jump through more hoops before they redistribute or remix a work I’ve made explicitly Free?

If you want to show respect, please send me something like this instead:

Dear Nina,

I thought you might like to know I’ve reused _________________  in _________________. Check it out at (insert URL here). Thanks for making the work Free!

Love,
Someone Who Understands Yes means Yes

Ahh, lovely. Thank you!

A complaint I hear often is that nowadays, thanks to the inerwebs, not only do artists “have to give their work away for free” but they also “have to be businessmen.” HA! One goal of freeing my work is to free me of paperwork, contracts, and the role of manager – and what is having to oversee and administrate every re-use but management? In the “Intellectual Property” model, artists either have to do much more negotiating and managing and paperwork, or they have to pay someone else to do it for them. They have to be businessmen, or hire businessmen. And hiring businessmen (agents, lawyers, etc.) still requires much paperwork, negotiating, and contracts.

Some still insist that I’ve “maintained more control” over Sita Sings the Blues. The point is I have maintained no control over it, and that benefits me. The point is I don’t have to be a business(wo)man. The point is that other people, the crowd, distribute the work, and cost me nothing.

As long as they don’t ask for permission.

Filed Under: permission, respect, time

What's Wrong With Video Games That You Can Finish In Three Hours?

from the that's-not-how-it's-done! dept

Clive Thompson tries to bust apart the commonly held wisdom that it should take 40 hours to complete a video game. He points to a recently well-received game that many reviewers dinged for the fact that it could be completed in three hours. They seemed to like pretty much everything about the game... other than that it was "too short." The standard, apparently (I had no idea) is that a video game should take approximately 40 hours to finish. But Thompson points out how silly that is. For many games, they just start to feel repetitive or stretched out. If you can do everything that needs to be done in just three hours -- why not do it. My guess is that many of the complaints just come from what people think they're "buying" with the game, and that includes "time spent on the game." So a game that seems short feels like "less value" even if that's not necessarily the case. Still, as Thompson points out, the game he's talking about, The Maw is much cheaper than the average 40-hour game anyway, so he's not clear why people are complaining. To be honest, I was unaware of the 40-hour standard, and am a bit surprised that it's apparently so standardized. I'd always just assumed that different games had different time-lengths (if they were "finishable" at all).

Filed Under: time, video games

Newsweeklies Struggling To Adapt To The Web

from the timeliness-and-competition dept

The Wall Street Journal has a good article looking at the decline of the major newsweeklies, Time and Newsweek. Each has gone through a round of employee buyouts, and they're struggling with how to adapt to the new media environment created by the Internet. Newsweek's editor is frustrated that his magazine has "this image that we're just middlebrow, you know, a magazine that your grandparents get." The web creates two fundamental challenges to a weekly magazine like Newsweek. First the web has raised the bar for timeliness. By the time the typical recipient of a newsweekly actually reads it, some of the articles will describe events that occurred close to two weeks ago. That makes it hard to compete with a news cycle that's measured in hours rather than days. It's no surprise, therefore, that people who grew up with the web aren't that interested in subscribing to Time and Newsweek. Fortunately, the newsweeklies appear to be addressing this challenge fairly well by beefing up their websites. We've praised Time for being one of the first mainstream media sites to make decades of archives freely available (and searchable) online. Unlike a few years ago, the Time and Newsweek websites are now clearly much more than an afterthought, with a stable of high-profile bloggers and a variety of original multimedia content. These kinds of features go a long way to attracting younger readers.

The more fundamental challenge, though, is the sheer number of new competitors in the media marketplace. A sharp increase in competition almost always leads to the erosion of market share for the incumbents, even if the incumbents execute perfectly. In this case, the proliferation of new options means that the demand for mainstream "middlebrow" reporting isn't as big as it used to be. Most people don't want to read the same generic mix of news that everyone else is reading. They want to customize their news, reading more about subjects they're most interested in and skipping subjects that don't interest them. That means that the 20th-century model, in which a handful of national media outlets publish "the news" that everybody reads, isn't going to work any more. Whereas a generation ago, most people subscribed to one newspaper and a couple of magazines, in the future people will cobble together their own mix of news from dozens of different websites, and from aggregators like Digg and Google News.

This means that sites will be more successful covering a few topics really well (and attracting a lot of links from other sites for their best coverage) than they will trying to cover every topic and often producing superficial, mediocre coverage. It also means that it's not reasonable to expect that most of a site's traffic will come from people who visit their home page on a daily basis. Rather, traffic is driven by being a part of the online conversation and getting other sites to link to and comment on your work. That's going to be a culture shock for a news organization that is used to having a more or less captive audience of several million subscribers who gets its magazine each and every week.

Filed Under: internet, news magazines, newsweek, time