EVQ

∝ NPR: New, more accurate atomic clock may “end time”

I read this yesterday and it didn’t sit well with me. I’m not sure time would “end” due to its accuracy of within 100 attoseconds (\(1\times10^{-16}\) as) per day.

That’s a problem, because to actually use time, you need different clocks to agree on the time. Think about it: If I say, ‘let’s meet at 3:30,’ we use our watches. But imagine a world in which your watch starts to tick faster, because you’re working on the floor above me. Your 3:30 happens earlier than mine, and we miss our appointment.

A sound concern. GPS satellites have to account for relativistic “time drift” caused by gravity. In fact, the clocks on these satellites have been found to have a net gain of 38 µs per day (a gain of 45 µs due to gravity and a loss of 7 µs due to their velocity). To keep that relative to the accuracy of the atomic clock, that’s 38,000,000,000,000 as per day. That sounds like a lot and it’s something a GPS has to account for, however their drift is 38 µs at an altitude of 20,000 km. The drift that would occur due to gravity between two observers at a distance of an office building floor (average of 3.9 meters) is so close to zero as to essentially be zero.

Say you’re the person on the ground floor. Even if the drift between your watches was equivalent to that of a GPS satellite, your partner would arrive to your meeting 0.000038 seconds before you. As an understandable point of reference in that time, a beam of light which travels at about 300,000 kilometers per second moved only about 11 kilometers from its source.

This clock operates on a time scale 16 orders of magnitude faster than anything humans can comprehend and about 5 orders faster[1] than our fastest microprocessor. Ask someone the time. Almost without fail, the most accurate reply will give you a reading down to the minute. Most people round to the nearest 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes.

The measurement of time is a way for us to express and comprehend our proximity to other events that have occurred in the past or that may occur in the future.[2]

We make and accept compromises in accuracy constantly because of the diminishing returns that further accuracy provides us. Our measurement of time is ultimately just an estimation of our distance from a point of reference just like a road sign.

The same was a more accurate ruler doesn’t “end” length, width, or height, a more accurate clock doesn’t “end” time.

The current world record holder for processor frequency runs at 8.794 GHz or approximately one cycle every 113,700,000 as. Showing my work: Ignoring the value of the constant, I solve the my units for what I’m looking for: \(\frac{\mathrm{cycles}}{\mathrm{second}}\) for \(\frac{\mathrm{second}}{\mathrm{cycle}}\) Since the units are reciprocals, the operation is \(\left(8.794\times10^9\right)^{-1}\) or \(\frac{1}{8.794\times10^9}\) seconds per cycle. This is approximately 113.7 picoseconds.  ↩

What are you even supposed to call the day before Black Friday now? Maybe the morning could be called “Thanksgiving” still, but the day itself is no longer a public holiday. In the never-ending pursuit of greater and greater sales, stores are opening even earlier this year for the busiest shopping day (now days) of the year. Some people are apparently ok with this. I’m not. Here’s why.

“Black Friday is when retail stores begin turning a yearly profit”

Incorrect. Setting aside that retail businesses that depend on sales generated over a 24–72 hour period (or even the 4 week period preceding Christmas) to determine their yearly profitability should have their leadership structure and business model completely reorganized, many retail outlets generate profit over all 4 fiscal quarters. Take a look at Costco, the company’s worst quarter of the five most recent quarters had a reported net income (profit) of $425 million (Q3 ’13). The company’s best quarter was its most recent at $697 million (Q2 ’14). Costco is profitable all year and is not open on Thanksgiving day.[1]

And let’s not get into how the deals that get people in the door are so heavily discounted as to be “loss leaders” instead of ones that make the retailer money.[2]

Walmart

Meanwhile, there’s Walmart. The leviathan of the retail world which saw a 5-quarter low net income of $3.578 billion (Q1 ’14) and a high of $4.314 billion (Q4 ’13)[3]. Last year, Walmart issued a press release boasting that between 6 PM and 10 PM, their stores “processed more than 10 million transactions”. For sanity’s sake, assume the rate of transactions per hour remained the same, that’s 2.5 million transactions per hour. With “more than 4,000 stores”, (using the numbers provided by Walmart to Forbes) and assuming a consistent rate of transactions per store across all stores, each store processed 625 transactions per store per hour. That’s only an increase of (at most) 160% over their average of 250 transactions per hour per store.[4] Obviously there is value in being open during this time for Walmart (or any other retailer for that matter), the question, however is whether Walmart wouldn’t see the same increase in sales—or greater—if it ran similar sales on another day. I would be willing to wager that if they ran a sale the day prior to Thanksgiving or some time after Black Friday, they’d see equal benefit.

“Firefighters, policemen, doctors, nurses, and transportation workers don’t get the day off!”

These professionals work in a position that is an essential service that must be made available (the argument can be made that transportation is not an essential service, but I digress). Retail is not essential in any sense of the word. Anyone who thinks otherwise should reevaluate their priorities in life.

It is not arrogance or entitlement by retail workers (who make up >30% of the U.S. labor market) to expect their employer to close their business twice a year to give them an ENTIRE DAY OFF to spend with their family celebrating Christmas[5] or giving thanks for the country that is running them into the ground of which they are privileged to be a citizen.

These workers should not be content merely to be grateful for their jobs and suffer this pile of shit along with all the other piles of shit with which they regularly suffer. No, they are not entitled to employment. What they are entitled to is the smallest bit of respect of their time by their employers and their customers. The United States is one of 10 countries on the planet that do not mandate a minimum number of days of paid leave provided by an employer.[6] Many of those countries have paid leave that coincides with public holidays, allowing for exactly this.

Again, it’s not entitlement, it’s respect.

Those who are entitled are those who are vociferously complaining and loudly proclaiming that they’re proudly shopping on Thanksgiving because if they want to claw a stranger’s eyes out so they can spend $50 on one of six 900-inch televisions that will break in 3 weeks, goddamnit, there’s no day they shouldn’t be allowed to do so.

By comparison, Best Buy has seen a low of $43 million and a high of $461 million over the past 5 quarters. Their most profitable quarter was one that did not include the holiday season (Q1 ’14). Best Buy is facing lower profit on fewer sales overall—as are Sears, J.C. Penny, Radio Shack, and others—but the consensus generally seems to be that these businesses suffer from systemic issues unrelated to the benefits they’d receive from minuscule profits brought in on Thanksgiving day.  ↩

The sales that draw people into the stores over the weekend following Thanksgiving often are considered loss leaders. Ever wonder why there’s only a handful of the so-called “Door Buster” deals? Often, the deal that shoppers who are—often quite literally—busting down the doors of the store for are financially harmful to the company. They continue to do this in hopes that limited stock of the sale item will lead to sales of more profitable items that are in stock through a combination of either upselling or purchasing the next best thing out of frustration.  ↩

Meanwhile, the American taxpayers are subsidizing Walmart’s profits on the order of $6 billion per year (source) in the form of food stamps provided as low-income aid to its employees who make up from 1.5%–2% of the workforce. Think of the economic boom that could result from Walmart paying its workers a decent wage.  ↩

Extrapolated using information from SAS in a white paper issued in 2012.  ↩

Issues with promoting one religious preference over the other aside.  ↩

This is an image I saw shared earlier today. The person who posted it has since deleted it, I assume realizing how awful it is. I felt the need to start a comment addressing it and it turned into something much longer. I feel that what I wrote has some worth and want to share it.

First off, to who posted it, I love you and respect you, but you have to know that I found it deeply offensive. Also, I realize the way I write can come off as combative or angry and while I’m angry at this image and the sentiment it expresses, I’m not angry at you. If anything, I’m hurt.

So to start, it’s no wonder why the original author was “attacked viciously” for posting this, my first reaction was one of anger. Most times, what happens—online especially—is that people take their first reaction and comment in the heat of the moment rather than taking time to fully explain their point. If I would have done that, I would have been apologizing for some rather strong words. Let me go into why…

It might not seem like it, but gay rights have only recently become a thing within the recent past. Here’s a list of things that I have to worry about in the United States because I’m attracted to men instead of women:

Getting married (ban in 30 states)

My husband and I both adopting a child (ban in 29 states)

Visiting my boyfriend/partner/husband in the hospital (no rights in 31 states)

Hate crime protection (none in 20 states)

Being fired from my job (legal in 29 states)

Being kicked out of an apartment/house (no laws in 29 states)

My child being bullied because they have two dads or because they, themselves are LGBT (no laws in 30 states)

There are only 12 states which have “full” and equal protections under the law for LGB people. Even these states lag behind when it comes to those who are transgender.

These are just laws. They don’t show the realities of discrimination on a daily basis that I—and others like me—face. Take holding hands: when I’ve been in a relationship, I have never felt comfortable walking down the street holding hands (not to mention displaying any sort affection that might be considered “gay”) for fear of some idiot deciding they’re going to harass me, assault me, or—if they’re completely insane—kill me. All of this is a possible reaction from others because of a display of affection that straight couples are seen doing on a highly regular basis to which others give no thought.

What makes pride most important though is that everything I’ve just described is a reality of life in the United States, supposedly the most free country in the world. In the U.K., they found that 1 in 6 LGB people were victims of some sort of homophobic related crime within the past 3 years.

Across the world, LGBT people are regularly harassed, beaten, and killed by mobs or as a government sanctioned punishment. There are 76 countries across the world who have criminalized homosexuality.

76.

Of those 76, 10 have gone further and instituted the death penalty as a punishment for the crime of someone sharing the same set of reproductive organs as the person they love.

Gay/LGBT pride is about many things, but most of all it’s to provide visibility (much like the “I’m Mormon” campaign…) and to dispel misconceptions. We’re not child molesters, we’re not out to “convert” anyone, have no plans to destroy marriage, and our “agenda” is usually pretty much the same as straight people except for an occasional wishing to be treated the same as them.

How many times have you been mistaken for being gay and then had people be shocked when you tell them you’re straight? It’s probably only a handful. Me? I’ve lost count. One of the end goals of pride is to make it so that telling someone you’re gay gets a similar reaction as telling someone you’re left-handed or your shoe size: they might be surprised, but ultimately don’t care.

We celebrate gay pride because others can’t. It’s not much, but it’s something. We celebrate our freedom—limited, but improving by the day—to love whoever we want in this country. We celebrate in hopes that others will see that it’s not who you love that is important, but that you love.