Does anybody really know what time it is? – IOTW Report

Does anybody really know what time it is?

How Earth Moves

27 Comments on Does anybody really know what time it is?

  1. I understood about the first 2/3 of that then it went over my head, but I loved it.

    Funny thing with the Gregorian calendar: software engineers at big companies do not understand the difference between the Julian calendar and the Gregorian calendar. Dates in Microsoft Excel are based on the year 1900 having a February 29. I had some business contact software that let you look up dates from the mid 1700’s to the mid 2300’s, with a February 29 in 1800, 1900, 2100, 2200, and 2300. It don’t work that way.

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  2. Having been a Navy navigator in the northern hemisphere, what I found most astounding about time and distance is that the North Star is almost 50 times larger than our sun but is so distant from us (more than 320 light years) that it remains as a very precise navigation aid and has been for 100s of years.

    I thanked Gid for Polaris many nights.

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  3. Time Enough at Last

    The best-laid plans of mice and men…and Henry Bemis, the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time.
    Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis, in the Twilight Zone.

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  4. All I know is that I had to work third shift in 1976 when the clock “falls back” and I had to stay an extra hour. Didn’t get that extra hour of sleep. Couple that with the hour of sleep I lost working first shift the previous spring, when the clock “springs forward” and I calculate that I lost an hour of sleep that I never made up. So, all of my behavioral problems since then I have blamed on being short an hour of sleep. At least, that’s what I tell my wife…

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  5. What is time versus how do we measure time are two completely different questions.

    Like asking “what is water?” It’s not a cup, a pint or a gallon.

    Time is not an hour, week, month or a year. It defines every moment and benchmark of our existence and the rocket surgeons among us only have theories as to what it actually is.

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  6. Cool video. I collect old pocket watches and have studied their standardization. The railroads really needed time zones and a unified time per time zone to avoid accidents. Really interesting reading.
    Don’t even get me started on mag north, true north, etc.

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