[time-nuts] Determining Time-Nut infection severity.

William H. Fite omniryx at gmail.com
Sun Oct 24 23:10:14 UTC 2010


But some nutty folks (c'est moi!) wear mechanical watches (an Omega
Seamaster in my case) just for the joy of owning an intricate mechanical
device that requires no 'lectricty and has silicon only in the crystal.  And
the crystal doesn't oscillate.

BTW, with what accuracy, do you suppose, were the intervals between Hari
Seldon's reappearances determined?

Betcha old Isaac would have had a plausible answer.





On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 6:53 PM, David Martindale <dave.martindale at gmail.com
> wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 24, 2010 at 1:44 PM, Richard H McCorkle
> <mccorkle at ptialaska.net> wrote:
> > Time-Nuts,
> >
> > New members to the Time-Nuts list may wonder if the Time-Nut disease
> > has infected them just by joining the list. A clear indication that
> > someone has been infected with the Time-Nut disease is they own a
> > reference that provides accurate time to better than 1us and
> > frequency to better than 1e-9.
>
> Is there a "cadet" grade?  I have a GPS receiver with 1PPS output, but
> it only claims microsecond accuracy.  I have an OCXO salvaged from an
> old Transit satellite navigator, but it claims no better than a few
> parts in 1e-8.  And I've got a Thunderbolt, but haven't found time to
> apply power to it.  So I guess I'm not up to the standards of a true
> time-nut.
>
> On the other hand, this does suggest a plausible metric for nuttiness:
> the negative of the base-10 log of the frequency uncertainty of the
> best reference you own.  So the scale for fully qualified nuts starts
> at 9 and goes upward.  Lower numbers are indicative of non-nuts (just
> owning a quartz watch puts you at about 5, at least if you care about
> its accuracy).
>
>     Dave
>
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