Quelle Heure Est Il?

It’s one of the few remembrances of my ill fated bout with French 1: “Quelle heure est il?” What time is it?

The answer has always been simple, but will now become painstakingly difficult with the new and improved switch to Daylight Saving Time&#185, coming this weekend.

From the NIST website: The current Daylight Saving Time rules represent a change from the past. On August 8, 2005, President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which included the changes in Daylight Saving Time described above, effective March 1, 2007. Prior to 2007, DST began at 2:00 a.m. (local time) on the first Sunday in April, and ended at 2:00 a.m. (local time) on the last Sunday in October. The new rules for DST beginning in 2007 mean an extra four or five weeks of DST each year. There will now be a total of 238 days of DST, compared to a total of 210 days of DST in 2006 under the previous rules. Daylight Saving Time and time zones are regulated by the U. S. Department of Transportation, and not by NIST.

Notice how NIST (National Institute for Standards and Technology) is desperately trying to distance itself from this debacle to come!

What will happen this weekend is much of what was feared for Y2K. I don’t expect planes to crash into mountains, but I do expect all sorts of small to moderate problems with everything from banks to clocks and watches to VCRs to alarm systems.

Yes, it will be a pain-in-the-ass to reset all my watches and the clocks that are now on everything electronic. The bigger problem will be reseting the items that are already programmed to set themselves later in the year.

I have one watch that just might be incapable of finding the right time! A website, associated with the vendor, says it should be OK. Unfortunately, the watch sets itself automatically off a low frequency radio station… a station it hears every once in a while.

How some computers are reset will make a big difference, because underlying our individual time zones are UTC, or Universal Coordinated Time (the order is screwy because the acronym is based on the original French).

If you look at the inner workings of email, you’ll see times are referenced in UTC plus or minus a variable. Lots of the Internet and international commerce in general, works that way.

Delivery-date: Mon, 05 Mar 2007 06:39:42 -0600

Received: from geofffo by longmont.hostforweb.net with local (Exim 4.63)

(envelope-from )

id 1HOCTe-0001BC-7d

for me@geofffox.com; Mon, 05 Mar 2007 06:39:42 -0600

My mailserver, in Chicago, is -0600. My home computer, here in Connecticut, is -0500. They understand a common time by using those offsets.

Unfortunately, lots of people will just reset their computer’s internal clock, throwing the mutually understood coordinated time off. The computer will still think it’s 5 or 6 or whatever hours off UTC, while it’s actually not!

I’m not sure how that will throw things into a tizzy – but it will.

At work, though my computers are on Eastern Time, everything we do is really done in UTC. All weather info around the world is UTC. Going to Daylight Saving Time means all my data will arrive an hour later. All the forecast guidance, all my computer generated help, will now be delayed.

I have a list of instructions that I have to follow to get each computer on the same page. I’m dreading that. Nothing digital ever works perfectly the first time.

Maybe I should just start with my watches now too?

This story will unfold this week. The bigger it is splashed, the smaller the problem will be. If this entry is the last you hear about it until the weekend, we’re in deep trouble.

&#185 – It is Daylight Saving, not Savings, Time.

Atomic Time

There is an article on cnn.com concerning a miniaturized atomic clock. Imagine a time standard the size of a grain of rice in a wristwatch.

Atomic clocks are valuable in science because they keep incredibly accurate time. Some can achieve accuracies as high as one second in six million years! This miniature model would be a little less precise.

… the atomic clock would be accurate to within a second every 300 years, making it more than 1,000 times more reliable than a very good wristwatch.

Reading this reminded me of the time I actually saw the atomic clock at the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Boulder, CO&#185. At the time I was hosting Inside Space on the SciFi Channel. Boulder is a hotbed of planetary science, which is what drew us. Going to NIST was icing on a nerdy cake.

The word ‘atomic’ conjures up the image of nuclear power or the Atom Bomb. That not what atomic is all about – at least in the clock world. The atomic clock at NIST measured a stream of atoms from a cesium source. I really don’t understand all the theory except to say that cesium is resonant at a very predictable frequency, 9,192,631,770 Hz. That’s the secret of the clock’s accuracy.

Unlike a standard clock, the NIST clock is a calibrating device. It doesn’t tell you the time. It just helps calibrate the instruments that do.

I hope I haven’t made this too difficult or screwed up my explanation. It really doesn’t matter, because that’s not the point of the story.

Our crew walked into a room and there was the clock. I remember it being longer horizontally than it was tall. There were wires and probes in it. I also remember some sort of insulating material over part of it.

It looked technical and homebuilt – like some astounding science fair project on steroids. We asked if it would be OK for me to stand alongside it while I taped an on-camera standup.

Our NIST guide said it would be fine… but one thing. Don’t bump into the clock. That sounded reasonable. And then, he continued.

“Don’t bump into the clock because they’ll have to evacuate the building. Of course, it won’t be a problem for us. We’ll be dead.&#178”

As it turns out, cesium is never found in nature as a pure element. It is very reactive – it wants to combine with other elements. It does that with great explosive power.

It reacts explosively with water, and with ice down to -116 C. In air, it catches fire spontaneously and burns with a brilliant sky-blue flame. Its hydroxide is the most powerful aqueous base known, and will eat through glass, flesh, bone, and numerous other substances.

I’m just trying to figure out how they’ll get this on someone’s wrist?

&#185 – Though I don’t remember the exact date, it was within a week or so of the murder of Jon Benet Ramsey in Boulder. Most locals were upset seeing a TV crew until they found out we weren’t covering that story.

&#178 – This is probably not an exact quote, though these exact words are etched in my mind. Whatever he said, it was very close to this. It certainly scared me and made me astoundingly careful.