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Tempus frangit
The night before last I didn't get to sleep until 4am. Last night I dropped off fine (because I was so tired after the previous night), but when I woke up my alarm clock said 5am. I began cursing my inability to sleep for a decent length of time. So as I was awake anyway, I got up and went to the loo, and as soon as I left my darkened bedroom I noticed it was suspiciously light for 5am in May.
It turned out that my alarm clock had somehow lost a couple of hours and it was in fact 7:19, which is much more sensible. However, that alarm clock is supposed to be radio-synchronised, so I had to check quite a few other clocks before I was convinced about which one of them was wrong. That's the trouble with radio clocks: most of the time they're much more reliable and accurate than ordinary clocks, but while an ordinary clock's failure mode is to gradually drift away from the right time so that as long as you set it or checked it recently you know it must be approximately right, a radio clock is capable of completely losing the plot in the space of minutes and leaving you utterly uncertain of the right time.
Oh well; when I got to work the clocks here seemed to think I'd got it about right, so no harm done. I just hope the alarm clock was only temporarily confused.
Also when I got in to work, I opened my mailbox and discovered that I had received spam about the Da Vinci Code. Arrrrgh! I've been waiting patiently for months for the entire world to shut up about that thoroughly uninspiring book, but it hasn't happened yet. If it isn't a high-profile plagiarism lawsuit or the high-profile launch of the film adaptation, it's endless ranting about the obvious truth, obvious fictionality or otherwise of the utterly clichéd conspiracy theory, which ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
cartesiandaemon pegged very accurately last week as being exactly the sort of thing Foucault's Pendulum was mercilessly mocking fifteen years before it was even published, so nobody has any excuse for taking it seriously, or indeed writing it, now. Nobody in the media seems to be able to stop talking about it, and I am absolutely sure it simply isn't interesting enough to warrant all that fascination. But now spammers are getting in on the deal as well and I've had enough. SHUT UP!
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(I found an actual spec once for the MSF signal. I don't recall it having particularly good error correction, although I suppose if it's clear and powerful enough it might not matter. I was terribly tempted to try to build a receiver for it, but I think that's just my standard instinct on seeing a clear specification for anything. :-)
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After five minutes I would probably try to find the time online (which is only half sensible as if it's generally pretty accurate from grenwich or somewhere, but you're bound to find somewhere an hour off :)).
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Indeed, one of the clocks I did end up checking was my computer's, which is NTP-synchronised so it counts as finding the time online.
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I've been thinking the same thing
My problem is that the Da Vinci Code is sent up on every vaguely comedic TV show, radio show, newspaper, si it becomes quite difficult not to know something about it. And it sounds rubbish... but there's this pressure to read it as you can't relate to the world at the moment without it. The same with Big Brother.
THe trouble is, I did the same thing with Harry Potter- ignored it for ages as everyone was talking about it, and then eventually liked it when I read it. How do you know if something is really rubbish without reading it? And then you've wasted your time and money anyway!
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