...more recent posts
Feelin' lucky today.
The BBC has a story about a new, and much more accurate atomic clock design.
Clocks have come a long way in the past one thousand years. In 1088, the Chinese developed a water clock accurate to about 100 seconds a day.So how accurate is it? Supposedly it is accurate to within one second over the lifetime of the universe. Cool short explanation if you click through.
In the 17th Century, pendulum clocks were accurate to about 10 seconds a day. By the 1930s, the most accurate clocks kept time to within a second over a three-day interval.
But it was with the introduction of atomic clocks, based on precisely measured microwaves emitted by specific atoms, that the precision of timekeeping became astronomical.
Atomic clock technology enabled scientists in 1967 to define the second as the period equal to 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation that corresponds to the transition between two energy levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.
By 1995, the best atomic clocks were accurate to a second every 15 million years - and now they have become even better with the new NISTL timepiece.
Complete frustration. I just spent several hours weeding through my incredibly poor code to find a simple bug in the subscription function. I got it finally, but what a freakin' mess. I haven't looked under the hood in so long I'd forgotten. Hope I don't have to go back in there again. I almost threw my computer out the window. Going to go walk around for a bit.
New 49 Clinton pictures start here.
Well, I finally had the dream. I've been dreaming a lot lately (or remembering them in the morning at least) and it's seemed like it was coming, but somehow always just out of reach. Some people call it lucid dreaming. Anyway, I had a few almost experiences lately where I would be in the dream and something would happen which would make me think "hey, this is just like in a dream" at which point I would try to figure out if I was awake or not. What had been happening to me at this point is that I would either decide a) I really am awake (wrong answer Jim) or b) I'd just sort of forget what I was thinking and wander back into the dream.
Anyway, the other night it finally happened. I was talking to someone about some numbers and every time we would decide on something the numbers would change. Finally I thought "this is weird, the numbers won't stay put - it's just like a dream." And I think because I'd been talking a lot with MB about this event, and about how it might come about, I immediately realized, "I am in a dream right now." Nice. Except then I wasn't able to stay in there. I've read all these accounts of people getting to this point and then being able to take control of their dream narrative. Like you can just start flying around, or whatever strikes your fancy. All while being aware that you are in fact dreaming. I've always been a little suspicious of these accounts, but I'm sure it's possible for someone. Just not me. At this point anyway.
In my dream, after I realized I was in a dream, my surroundings just started to fade out. Everything became grey, blurry, and low resolution. I remembered reading something about trying to spin your dream body around in order to stay in the dream (like the sufi kind of spinning) and I even tried this, but it didn't work. In another moment I was awake. Still, I'm happy to report I got that far.
Do you ever wake up inside a dream and get to stay there? How do you do it?
I can't believe Kermit the frog is shilling for AIG. It's just not right.
My phone is not receiving calls. I think they are all going right into my voicemail, but honestly I haven't listened to all the messages. Sorry if I've missed you. Write me email until I get this straightened out.
Holy cow. David McCusker mentioned me, although I think he only saw the links page and not this one. I guess some internal navigational links would be good for that link page. Anyway, I couldn't agree more with him about being in awe of Matthew Rossi's writing, as well as his fonts being basically unreadable in Netscape 4.7. On the Mac I just turn off javascript and this makes CSS not work, so the fonts just default to my (much larger) setting. Works O.K. plus it defeats almost all pop up adds.
Very glad something here was of some interest to someone.
The searching zeitgeist
Google now has a cool page of statistics about what people are searching for. (via /.)
Bust? What bust? Douglas Rushkoff explains the history of the web, and why it's doing better than ever, despite what some would have you believe.
Nothing very original, but that's never his point. He's more of a summing it up for people on the outside kind of writer. And I think he gets the general feel correct. The internet stock crash was a good thing for the web, because the web is not about making money off of people, it's about communicating with them.