Obsidian Sync 2024-11-25 08:50:46

content/daily-notes/2024-11-24.md

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+### 2024-11-24
+#### Keeping Time
+[The mind-bending new science of measuring time](https://www.ft.com/content/625d2043-a5a4-4d6d-bbe9-42e524a211dd) #time #atomic
+
+> As late as the middle of the 20th century, our time remained tied to the Sun. A second was officially defined as a fraction of the solar year. But in 1967, deep in the atomic age, the 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures in Paris ruled that the second would now be defined according to vibrations of the caesium atom. Ever since, timekeeping has become the domain of physicists, extracted in sunless laboratories with precision optics, synthesised by computers and distributed by satellites.
+> 
+> Caesium atoms, when excited by just the right frequency, resonate, like a wine glass shattered by an opera singer. By measuring this frequency, we measure time. Atoms make for handy clockwork. They don’t have mechanical parts, and they don’t wear out. They are attractively standard. While sunlight and pendulums vary, every caesium atom is identical to any other. And they tick very fast.
+
+
+and the cutest part
+
+> As late as the second world war, Londoners could hire a woman named Ruth Belville. Once a week, Belville set her family’s pocket chronometer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. She then visited her clients around the city, telling them what time it was, and they would set their own clocks. The Belvilles had operated this service since 1836. Now Nist servers respond to more than 100 billion requests a day for the time, synchronising between a quarter and half of all machines connected to the internet.
+
+Lots of interest anecdotes and historical trivia about timekeeping in the article.
+
+Also, on a more technical note this reminded of this fascinting podcast that I heard a long time ago, but still remember fondly, about maintaining accurate time on computers:  [Signals and Threads | Clock Synchronization](https://signalsandthreads.com/clock-synchronization/)
+
+#### LLMs for Indepth Learning
+This is a good Twitter post from Justin Skycak of MathAcademy on his experience trying to get LLMs to teach him biology indepth, from the ground up. His methodology and the prompts he used are instructive
+
+![](https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1859457123488330023)