SCALES #6
Hello!
In honor of the start of US Daylight Savings Time (and the confusion it caused me for a video call to Switzerland), I wanted to know, what exactly is the UTC from which I've gone -05:00 to -04:00, anyway?
It turns out UTC ("Coordinated Universal Time") depends on two other time standards: International Atomic Time (TAI) and Universal Time (UT1, more or less). TAI is the weighted average of a worldwide network of hundreds of atomic clocks, so it's precisely calibrated to the defined length of a second. The shortcoming of TAI is that it doesn't account for irregularities in the length of a day on Earth, which is where Universal Time comes in. Some of the major sources of annual variability in the length of a day—the "equation of time", whose y-axis is on the scale of over ten minutes!—get averaged out into the "mean solar day", which involves delightful concepts such as the "mean sun" and a "mean observatory".
However, the irregularities accounted for by UT1 get more complicated than that! "Solar time, legal time, time in use", a 2011 paper by Bernard Guinot of the Observatoire de Paris, gets into the nitty-gritty, including going to the trouble of defining "rotation of the Earth" as "the rotation of a reference system attached statistically to the Earth's crust which is deformable at the level of some centimetres per year". The paper details other phenomena affecting the length of day, such as the gradual slowing of Earth's rotation (the day becomes about 2.06 milliseconds longer per century), and decadal fluctuations attributed to interactions between the Earth's core and mantle. (Let me know if you're interested in access to this paper—it has a lot of other fun details.)
So if TAI is atomic time, and UT1 is a very carefully determined "solar time", UTC is derived from both of them. UTC is defined to be an integer number of (TAI-derived) seconds away from TAI, such that there's less than nine-tenths of a second discrepancy between UT1 and UTC. Changing the number of seconds offset between UTC and TAI is the origin of the vaunted "leap-second", of which there have been 27 since 1972. Guinot makes the point, however, that socially, people tolerate large discrepancies between local time and solar time (something I have been gaining experience of, living in a far eastern outpost of my time zone). His suggestion for avoiding the headaches caused by leap-seconds is to let UTC drift much further away from UT1: only to snap UTC back to the "ground truth" of UT1 when addition of a full "leap-hour" is desired. He estimates that following this system, we ("we") wouldn't have to start thinking about introducing the first leap-hour until the twenty-sixth century or later.
The moral of the story being, of course, that so-called "universal" time (a name Guinot describes as "stamped with the grandiloquence of the 19th century") is really a result of historical precedent, technological ability, geological and astronomical happenstance, and political and social decisions on the purpose of time and timekeeping.
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So I've been listening to this podcast...
By my reckoning, The Messenger has been the best podcast of 2017 so far. The most recent episode explores detainee Aziz's decision to twice attempt an open ocean voyage on a human smuggling boat to Christmas Island, and the politics and policy of the Australian government's attempts to deter boat crossings.
I was delighted to learn that Janina Ramirez and Phil Selway, drummer of Radiohead, are chums. Their chat about Gerhard Richter, John Cage, and being part of an "art scene" is all kinds of charming.
World premiere recording of Haas' Ninth String Quartet performed by the JACK Quartet on the Meet the Composer podcast, including an illuminating pre-performance talk with the quartet with demonstrations of the extended techniques they are terrifyingly good at.
Email newsletters of note
Josh Shutter, a fellow grad student in my lab, is blogging about his research cruise in an icebreaker across the Southern Ocean: "I wouldn’t mind if the waves gently rocked us, but they normally toss me around the room if I’m not holding onto something. It’s like a ride at the amusement park, except this one never seems to stop." You can subscribe to email updates!
Sarah Jaffe: "Talking to the strikers at Sumco, to the soon-to-be-laid-off Rexnord workers, I was reminded that "privilege" is often weaponized against traditionally-striking workers as well. How dare you make demands, they'll just move your factory to Mexico too. You've overpriced yourselves--always said to $20-an-hour line workers doing 12-hour shifts, never to $1.5 million-a-year CEOs."
David Dayen has been watching the mess in Puerto Rico with a consistency I haven't seen elsewhere.
Links
I'm trying to do a better job at giving credit to where I'm finding these links. Perpetual credit is due to the links on Nuzzel from my Twitter feed, and Dan Piepenbring's tireless work on The Paris Review Daily. I'll try to hat-tip sources when not a diffuse "everywhere on my corner of Twitter/the Internet", or found by me directly.
"Kedit (pronounced “kay-edit”), a product of the Mansfield Software Group, is the only text editor I have ever used. I have never used a word processor" John McPhee talking structure and writing in a 2013 New Yorker piece. With figures! (h/t some lost MetaFilter comment)
George Saunders is doing an excellent job at putting out pieces that make me want to read his new book (both h/t TPR Daily, I reckon):
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"Tolstoy imagined you generously, you rose to the occasion": on his writing process. (I would only correct the headline to "what a writer really does when he writes". I'm definitely on Saunders' wavelength w/r/t patient iterative improvements, but there's no way it's the Single True Path.)
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An appreciation of Grace Paley, a writer previously unknown to me.
"In 1778, Henry Fuseli drew himself crestfallen, seated by the foot and hand of the colossus, and called it ‘The artist moved to despair at the grandeur of antique fragments’. His figure – lightly sketched – is almost invisible beside the giant remnants of the statue. Not so Twombly, who stands forthright in profile as though measuring himself against the hand. He doesn’t seem fazed by it." (h/t TPR Daily)
Impressive piece of poetimusicological sleuthing by Matthew Guerrieri into the true reception history of "That Shakespearean Rag": "Is that why Eliot remembered it at that point? Felix Adler, the vaudevillian, making a cheap burlesque of Hamlet’s death; Felix Adler, the humanist, making (in Eliot’s estimation) a cheap burlesque, in essence, of Christ’s—humanism’s elegant intelligence leading not to a viable tradition, but rather to something as shallow and ephemeral as a popular song."
The clearest explanation I've read of the difference between coral reef bleaching and die-off, and the timescales at play (h/t @vruba).
Sometimes it's important to read Irish politicians expressing their love for Beyoncé.
Science!
Let me know if you have paywall issues...
Describing how the hole of a donut-shaped droplet shrinks.
"Geologists do not define continents: instead, they characterize the types of crust and delineate their geological features. By this definition, Zealandia is not a continent. Indeed, it is 94% continental margin with an extended shelf." Bam! Shooting down an "eighth continent".
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Turns out this helped to make a big difference.
If I got any of that time stuff wrong, please let me know! I read the replies.
—Adam