Do you eat the red ones last?

[austin_dern]

I was getting a bit bugged by the absence of Smarties in the local 7-Elevens, and I didn't find any in the campus bookstore either, and couldn't think where I might find a box. So I went down to the grocery store, which is decorated for Christmas and taking orders for delivered Christmas dinners, and found, reassuringly, all manner of boxes of the M&&-like candy. In fact, there's a new package I hadn't noticed before, a Quad Pack, which is three ``Fun Size,'' by which they mean, ``Small size'', boxes themselves in a box, with a toy inside -- it looks like one of those three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles, but I haven't opened it yet. Also I picked up a Mini Smarties case, which is about the size of the Omni time-travel pocket watch from Voyagers! and rattles in a most satisfying manner. Must just be a 7-Eleven fluke.

In spam subject lines and such -- I notice these things -- I noticed one from the engagingly-named ``Quetzacoatl Rogan'', which is getting into Cordwainder Smith territory. There was another selling ``Flawless Generic Advisers'', which certainly we couldn't do without, but we can't say just why. And another had the subject line ``Procrastinate Now!'', which seems like it should be either impossible or a tautology, but isn't really either. It just looks like it should be.

Also I picked up a model of the Shenzhou, that I'm trying to build quickly. Plastic scale model building tends to result in nothing but unfinished projects, even for people better able to organize their time than I am. Granted I always leave something in my kits unfinished (a personality quirk with is either Shinto or lazy), but these days it's hard for me to get one completely built per year. I've still got a Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Enterprise-A kit unbuilt. Sometimes it's fun to just plough through and build one in, like, a week. The instruction sheet claims there are decals, which the box doesn't have. Given that I'm thinking of giving it a stylized paint scheme rather than an accurate one.

Trivia: The Celsius scale was reversed from Anders Celsius's original scheme, with 0 as water boiling and 100 as water freezing, to its present scheme in 1750 by Märten Strömer. Source: Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold, Tom Shachtman.

Currently Reading: The Longest Battle, Richard Hough.

Comments

[gingerdavid.livejournal.com]

But the advancement and refinement of authoratiative time, and measuring things like a 'second', do have a bit of that newness.

Of all the fundamental physical quantities (length, mass, time, temperature, ...), time is the one that we can measure most accurately.

Astronomers and physicists have spent the last three hundred years developing ever-better ways of measuring time, first using the Earth's rotation, then mechanical clocks, quartz-crystal clocks, and finally clocks that use the oscillations of the very atoms themselves to measure time with incredible accuracy.

See, for example, "Splitting the Second" by A.W. Jones, which is an excellent account of the development of atomic clocks.

Having said that, all is not well in the arcane world of ultra-high-precision timekeeping. An argument is brewing about the future of the "leap second" which is occasionally added to the end of the year:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4271810.stm

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Jones's book is a really good one, by the way, The exact details of UT0, UT1, and so on, get pretty baffling but the book manages to keep it all reasonably clear. And the story of getting to ever-more-precise time is a fascinating one.