Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,800 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

This is providing that my Atomic Clock is correct.

Clocks that do not lose time

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/266848#ixzz1clGW5a9m

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Video: New Atomic Clock Reaches A 100 Quadrillionth Of A Second Accuracy

by Serkan Toto  From TechCrunch.com

A team of researchers at the University of Tokyo has developed a new type of optical atomic clock that boasts a 100 quadrillionth of a second accuracy (one quadrillion has 15 zeros). The optical lattice clock is the brain child of Professor Katori who says his device observes a million atoms simultaneously whereas conventional atomic clocks measure time by using single atoms.

The Professor explains:

“(…) if one clock is placed one centimeter higher than another clock, the higher clock is affected by less gravity, so it goes faster. That difference could be read out in the 18th decimal place of the clocks in one second averaging time. Until now, clocks have been thought of as tools for sharing a common time. But with clocks like this, conversely, we can understand that time passes at different speeds, depending on the time and place a clock is at.”

The idea is to eventually use the new clock to improve GPS (which is based on atomic clocks delivering 14-or 15-digit accuracy) or to predict earthquakes, for example.

This video (shot by Diginfonews in Tokyo, in English) provides more insight:

______________________________________________

Twisted Design: Telling Time With Toys and Bluetooth

Who knew that watching a clock work could be so hypnotizing? The Tilted Twister clock from Hans Andersson is composed of two Lego Minstorm bricks connected by Bluetooth. The master brick is in charge of tracking the time and operating the minute digits. The slave brick is responsible for moving the seconds indicator and the hour digits.

Watching the time change ever so slowly from one minute to the next is a surprisingly entertaining venture. The digits all consist of five layers of black and white tiles. The tiles are twisted around by the top layer until they form the appropriate digit.

Staring at the video of this awesome clock is one thing, but it’s so loud that it would probably be a huge pain to live with. Still, it might be worth the irritation just to have such a unique and artful timepiece keeping you grounded in reality.

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World War I ends

At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the Great War ends. At 5 a.m. that morning, Germany, bereft of manpower and supplies and faced with imminent invasion, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside Compiégne, France. The First World War left nine million soldiers dead and 21 million wounded, with Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France, and Great Britain each losing nearly a million or more lives. In addition, at least five million civilians died from disease, starvation, or exposure.

Victoria Belanger via Flickr

On June 28, 1914, in an event that is widely regarded as sparking the outbreak of World War I, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, was shot to death with his wife by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Ferdinand had been inspecting his uncle’s imperial armed forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, despite the threat of Serbian nationalists who wanted these Austro-Hungarian possessions to join newly independent Serbia. Austria-Hungary blamed the Serbian government for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the problem of Slavic nationalism once and for all. However, as Russia supported Serbia, an Austro-Hungarian declaration of war was delayed until its leaders received assurances from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany would support their cause in the event of a Russian intervention.

On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the tenuous peace between Europe’s great powers collapsed. On July 29, Austro-Hungarian forces began to shell the Serbian capital, Belgrade, and Russia, Serbia’s ally, ordered a troop mobilization against Austria-Hungary. France, allied with Russia, began to mobilize on August 1. France and Germany declared war against each other on August 3. After crossing through neutral Luxembourg, the German army invaded Belgium on the night of August 3-4, prompting Great Britain, Belgium’s ally, to declare war against Germany.

For the most part, the people of Europe greeted the outbreak of war with jubilation. Most patriotically assumed that their country would be victorious within months. Of the initial belligerents, Germany was most prepared for the outbreak of hostilities, and its military leaders had formatted a sophisticated military strategy known as the “Schlieffen Plan,” which envisioned the conquest of France through a great arcing offensive through Belgium and into northern France. Russia, slow to mobilize, was to be kept occupied by Austro-Hungarian forces while Germany attacked France.

The Schlieffen Plan was nearly successful, but in early September the French rallied and halted the German advance at the bloody Battle of the Marne near Paris. By the end of 1914, well over a million soldiers of various nationalities had been killed on the battlefields of Europe, and neither for the Allies nor the Central Powers was a final victory in sight. On the western front—the battle line that stretched across northern France and Belgium—the combatants settled down in the trenches for a terrible war of attrition.

In 1915, the Allies attempted to break the stalemate with an amphibious invasion of Turkey, which had joined the Central Powers in October 1914, but after heavy bloodshed the Allies were forced to retreat in early 1916. The year 1916 saw great offensives by Germany and Britain along the western front, but neither side accomplished a decisive victory. In the east, Germany was more successful, and the disorganized Russian army suffered terrible losses, spurring the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917. By the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia and immediately set about negotiating peace with Germany. In 1918, the infusion of American troops and resources into the western front finally tipped the scale in the Allies’ favor. Germany signed an armistice agreement with the Allies on November 11, 1918.

World War I was known as the “war to end all wars” because of the great slaughter and destruction it caused. Unfortunately, the peace treaty that officially ended the conflict—the Treaty of Versailles of 1919—forced punitive terms on Germany that destabilized Europe and laid the groundwork for World War II.

Also on This Day

American Revolution

Poor leadership leads to Cherry Valley Massacre, 1778

Automotive

The General Lee jumps into history, 1978

Civil War

Confederate General Benjamin McCulloch is born, 1811

Cold War

Soviet Union refuses to play Chile in World Cup Soccer, 1973

Crime

Police make a grisly discovery in Dorothea Puente’s lawn, 1988

Disaster

Skiers die in cable-car fire, 2000

General Interest

Nat Turner executed in Virginia, 1831

George Patton born, 1885

Dedication of the Tomb of the Unknowns, 1921

Hollywood

Interview with the Vampire debuts, 1994

Literary

Louisa May Alcott publishes her first story, 1852

Music

Donna Summer earns her first #1 pop hit with “MacArthur Park”, 1978

Old West

Massive dust storm sweeps South Dakota, 1933

Presidential

Franklin Pierce marries Jane Appleton, 1834

James Garfield marries Lucretia Rudolph, 1858

Sports

Fernando Valenzuela wins Cy Young Award, 1981

Vietnam War

Viet Cong release U.S. prisoners of war, 1967

Operation Commando Hunt commences, 1968

Long Binh base turned over to South Vietnam, 1972

World War I

World War I ends, 1918

World War II

Draft age is lowered to 18, 1942

This Week in History, Nov 11 – Nov 17

Nov 11, 1918

World War I ends

Nov 12, 1954

Ellis Island closes

Nov 13, 1982

Vietnam Veterans Memorial dedicated

Nov 14, 1851

Moby-Dick published

Nov 15, 1867

First stock ticker debuts

Nov 16, 1532

Pizarro traps Incan emperor Atahualpa

Nov 17, 1558

Elizabethan Age begins

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• What are the 6 main causes of World War1 (wiki.answers.com)
• How the course of events went from being a local conlict to a world war (wiki.answers.com)
• The Beauty and the Sorrow by Peter Englund, and The Quick and the Dead by Richard van Emden: review (telegraph.co.uk)
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Birth of the U.S. Marine Corps

 During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress passes a resolution stating that “two Battalions of Marines be raised” for service as landing forces for the recently formed Continental Navy. The resolution, drafted by future U.S. president John Adams and adopted in Philadelphia, created the Continental Marines and is now observed as the birth date of the United States Marine Corps.

Serving on land and at sea, the original U.S. Marines distinguished themselves in a number of important operations during the Revolutionary War. The first Marine landing on a hostile shore occurred when a force of Marines under Captain Samuel Nicholas captured New Province Island in the Bahamas from the British in March 1776. Nicholas was the first commissioned officer in the Continental Marines and is celebrated as the first Marine commandant. After American independence was achieved in 1783, the Continental Navy was demobilized and its Marines disbanded.

In the next decade, however, increasing conflict at sea with Revolutionary France led the U.S. Congress to establish formally the U.S. Navy in May 1798. Two months later, on July 11, President John Adams signed the bill establishing the U.S. Marine Corps as a permanent military force under the jurisdiction of the Department of Navy. U.S. Marines saw action in the so-called Quasi-War with France and then fought against the Barbary pirates of North Africa during the first years of the 19th century. Since then, Marines have participated in all the wars of the United States and in most cases were the first soldiers to fight. In all, Marines have executed more than 300 landings on foreign shores.

Today, there are more than 200,000 active-duty and reserve Marines, divided into three divisions stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina; Camp Pendleton, California; and Okinawa, Japan. Each division has one or more expeditionary units, ready to launch major operations anywhere in the world on two weeks’ notice. Marines expeditionary units are self-sufficient, with their own tanks, artillery, and air forces. The motto of the service is Semper Fidelis, meaning “Always Faithful” in Latin.

A big Happy Birthday and Semper Fi to all my jarhead brothers out there.-Bloggo

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Rich Shulman writes

The dignity of these ceremonies is impressive, even as the Pentagon is taking flak over the treatment of remains at the Dover mortuary.

Veterans Day PhotoBlog posts

Arlington National Cemetary posts

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

The caisson carrying the remains of the three soldiers missing in action from the Vietnam War, arrives for burial services at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., Wednesday, Nov., 9. The remains represent the entire crew are being buried in a single casket are; Capt. Arnold E. Holm, Jr. of Waterford, Conn., Spc. Robin R. Yeakley of South Bend., Ind., and Pfc. Wayne Bibbs of Chicago.

From MSNBC.com

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Anthony Bolante / Reuters

Biological analyst Alan Dowden of the Seattle Sperm Bank rides the Sperm Bike, a custom-designed, high-tech bicycle used to deliver donated sperm to fertility clinics, in Seattle Nov. 8, 2011.

Anthony Bolante / Reuters

Biological analyst Alan Dowden of the Seattle Sperm Bank places a transportation container aboard the Sperm Bike, a custom-designed, high-tech bicycle used to deliver donated sperm to fertility clinics, in Seattle, Nov. 8, 2011.

From MarketWire:

Seattle has become the second city to showcase a ‘sperm bike’ making sperm  deliveries from a sperm bank to fertility clinics. The European Sperm Bank, one  of the largest in Europe and located in Copenhagen, Denmark — perhaps the  world’s most bike-friendly city — made news reports globally after it began  deliveries in a custom-designed bike with a cooling system built inside the  ‘sperm head‘ for storing tanks with sperm specimens.

The company’s CEO,  Peter Bower, says, “The first idea was how we could deliver to the fertility  clinics in a CO2-friendly way. Then we realized that the bike could promote both  cycling and the need for donors to help childless families around the world.”

The European Sperm Bank’s Seattle lab (www.europeanspermbankusa.com)  worked with Portland’s Splendid Cycles and Antimatter.com to construct the sperm  structure, built of Jesmonite on top of a Bullitt cargo bike. With the tail, the  bike is 9 1/2 feet long and weighs about 110 pounds fully loaded. The Seattle  version includes a small electrical motor to give riders a boost on Seattle’s  many hills (unlike flat Copenhagen, where the assist is not needed).

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By Yereth Rosen | Reuters

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – An “epic” storm was bearing down on western Alaska on Tuesday, the National Weather Service said, warning that it could be one of the worst on record for the state.

The storm, moving inland from the Aleutian Islands, was expected to bring hurricane-force winds with gusts up to 100 miles per hour, heavy snowfall, widespread coastal flooding and severe erosion to most of Alaska’s west coast, the National Weather Service said.

Photo By NATHANIEL WILDER/REUTERS

A passenger sleeps inside the Alaska Airlines check-in area in Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport in Achorage, Alaska, November 8, 2011. Passengers were left stranded as flights in Anchorage were cancelled to villages in northwest Alaska as an “epic” storm was bearing down on western Alaska on Tuesday, the National Weather Service said, warning that it could be one of the worst on record for the state.

“This will be an extremely dangerous and life threatening storm of an epic magnitude rarely experienced,” the service said in a special warning message.

Nome and the rest of the Seward Peninsula, a section of land that juts out toward Siberia, were expected to be the hardest-hit areas, said Andy Brown, lead forecaster for the National Weather Service in Anchorage.

Image via Wikipedia

 Powerful storms in the North Pacific and Bering Sea are common this time of year, but this event is unusual because of its trajectory, Brown said.

“It’s going very far north,” he said.

Officials in Nome issued an evacuation order late on Tuesday for people living along Front Street, a beachside avenue that serves as the finish line for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, and for other low-lying areas in town.

At least three other communities were housing residents in local shelters as of Tuesday afternoon, said Bryan Fisher, chief of operations for the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

But long-distance evacuations from the remote region were not considered feasible, Fisher told a media briefing in Anchorage.

View Video-

http://d.yimg.com/nl/ynews/blog/player.html#vid=27205282&browseCarouselUI=hide
NATIVE VILLAGES IN HARM’S WAY

“Air traffic will not be flying in the weather that we’re expecting in the
next 24 to 48 hours,” he said.

Posing an additional threat is the lack of sea ice off northwestern Alaska,
forecasters said.

The last time a storm of a similar magnitude was sent in the same northward direction was 1974, but the sea surface was much more frozen then, Brown said.

“History tells that the sea ice helps subdue the storm surge,” Brown said. “With no sea ice there, we could see the full brunt of that 6- to 9-foot storm surge.”

Arctic sea ice this year reached the second-lowest coverage since satellite records began in 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

“Forty years ago, a big storm like this would come through and the sea ice would act as sort of a buffer,” said Mark Serreze, director of the Snow and Ice Data Center.

“The Bering Sea has and always will have these strong storms. What is
different now is their potential destructiveness as you lose the sea ice cover,” he added.

Federal, state and local agencies were making emergency preparations in advance of the storm. The state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management set up an incident command, with numerous agencies coordinating responses.

The U.S. Coast Guard said it has staged helicopters in the region and sent a cutter to prepare for emergency responses, with a special focus on the crab-fishing fleet.

Numerous government agencies have set up an incident command, said Jeremy Zidek, a spokesman for the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

Nome, with 3,600 residents, is one of the largest cities in western Alaska. The communities spread along the coastline are mostly traditional Native settlements, with a few hundred to a few thousand inhabitants, and no roads linking communities.

Although the region is sparsely populated, the storm presents significant dangers, Alaska Senator Mark Begich said in a written statement.

“I realize we are in a remote part of the country, but many people and communities are in harm’s way,” Begich said.

(Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Cynthia Johnston)

It Started Digital Wheels Turning

By JOHN MARKOFF

Researchers in Britain are about to embark on a 10-year, multimillion-dollar project to build a computer — but their goal is neither dazzling analytical power nor lightning speed.

Indeed, if they succeed, their machine will have only a tiny fraction of the computing power of today’s microprocessors. It will rely not on software and silicon but on metal gears and a primitive version of the quaint old I.B.M. punch card.

What it may do, though, is answer a question that has tantalized historians for decades: Did an eccentric mathematician named Charles Babbage conceive of the first programmable computer in the 1830s, a hundred years before the idea was put forth in its modern form by Alan Turing?

Image via Wikipedia

The machine on the drawing boards at the Science Museumin London is the Babbage Analytical Engine, a room-size mechanical behemoth that its inventor envisioned but never built.

The project follows the successful effort by a group at the museum to replicate a far less complicated Babbage invention: the Difference Engine No. 2, a calculating machine composed of roughly 8,000 mechanical components assembled with a watchmaker’s precision. That project was completed in 1991.

The new effort — led by John Graham-Cumming, a programmer, and Doron Swade, a former curator at the museum — has already digitized Babbage’s surviving blueprints for the Analytical Engine. But the challenges of building it are daunting.

In the case of the Difference Engine, a complete set of plans existed. The Analytical Engine, by contrast, was a work in progress, as Babbage continually refined his thinking in a series of blueprints. Thus, the hope is to “crowd-source” the analysis of what should be built; plans will be posted online next year, and the public will be invited to offer suggestions.

“There is no single set of plans that design a single machine.” said Tim Robinson, a docent at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “It was constantly in a state of flux.”

The project is significant in part because there has been a heated debate over whether — given time and resources — Babbage would have been able to build the machine he foresaw.

The idea was proposed last year by Mr. Graham-Cumming, who suggested a three-step project in which a decision would first be made on which blueprint to focus on, then a three-dimensional computer simulation would be created, and finally the machine would be built.

“I hope that future generations of scientists will stand before the completed Analytical Engine, think of Babbage and be inspired to work on their own 100-year leaps,” he wrote.

Babbage, who lived from 1791 to 1871, is rightfully known as the “father of computing.” But it would be left to a fellow scientist, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, to fully appreciate that his inventions were more than just tools for automatically tabulating logarithms and trigonometric functions.

Lovelace — daughter of the poet Lord Byron — recognized that the Analytical Engine could be a more generalized media machine, capable of making music and manipulating symbols. And 113 years before John McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence,” she considered — and then rejected — the notion that computers might exhibit creativity or even thought.

While Babbage was driven by the desire to automate tabular data for military and related applications, Lovelace wrote a lengthy commentary on the design that would prove deeply influential when it was rediscovered in the middle of the 20th century.

Lovelace is known as the first programmer, because she designed a program for the unbuilt machine. The algorithm appears in a series of notes written by Lovelace after a friend of Babbage asked her to translate an Italian professor’s write-up of a lecture Babbage had given at the University of Turin.

The Lovelace notes are remarkable both for her algorithm for calculating the sequence known as Bernoulli numbers and for what would become known as the “Lovelace objection.” In passing, she commented that the Babbage computer would not originate anything, but rather could do only what it had been instructed. The implication was that machines would not be creative, and thus not intelligent.

The consensus of computer historians is that while Babbage was clearly the first to conceive of the flexible machine that foreshadowed the modern computer, his work was forgotten and was then conceptually recreated by Turing a century later.

In 1936, Turing wrote “On Computable Numbers,” in which he reformulated and advanced ideas first put forward by Kurt Gödel in 1931, positing the existence of what would be called “Turing machines” — an abstract computing device that was intended as an aid to exploring the limitations of what could be computed — and demonstrating that such devices could in principle perform any mathematical computation that was represented as an algorithm.

“The pioneers of electronic computing reinvented the fundamental principles largely in ignorance of the details of Babbage’s work,” said Dr. Swade, the former museum curator. “They knew of him, there was a continuity of influence, but his drawings were not the DNA of modern computing.”

He argues that Turing was a “bridging” figure between Babbage and Lovelace and the modern world of electronic computers.

A Turing biographer, Andrew Hodges, doubts that his subject had seen the Lovelace notes when he wrote “On Computable Numbers.”

“It’s most unlikely that Babbage/Lovelace had any influence on Turing in 1936,” Dr. Hodges, an Oxford mathematician, wrote in an e-mail. “Motivation, means, language, results were all completely different.”

By 1950, however, Turing clearly had come in contact with Lovelace’s work: He responded to her objection to the notion of computers’ thinking in his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Indeed, a small element of mystery surrounds the question of when Turing did actually come in contact with Babbage’s plans.

Dr. Hodges acknowledges that no clear point in time is evident, but notes that by 1945 the Analytical Engine had come to prominence.

“Anecdotally, it has been said that Babbage’s name came up in discussions at Bletchley Park after the success of the Colossus in 1944,” Dr. Hodges wrote, in a reference to the machines developed in England during World War II to break German codes.

Moreover, although Lovelace is now renowned as the first programmer, her more significant contribution was in being the first to comprehend the significance of programmable computers. Her notes, which were signed only with her initials because at the time women were not thought to be authors, gave the reader a clear sense of the broader potential of modern computing.

It was not until the 1970s that the idea of computers as “dynamic” media machines took hold in the work of computer scientists like Alan Kay.

The leaders of the new project argue that the first conceptual leap was Lovelace’s. “The real intellectual triumph of Lovelace is overlooked by most people,” Mr. Graham-Cumming said.

As she put it, “It would be a mistake to suppose that because its results are given in the notation of a more restricted science, its processes are therefore restricted to those of that science.”

From New York Times

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Nazis launch Kristallnacht

On this day in 1938, in an event that would foreshadow the Holocaust, German Nazis launch a campaign of terror against Jewish people and their homes and businesses in Germany and Austria. The violence, which continued through November 10 and was later dubbed “Kristallnacht,” or “Night of Broken Glass,” after the countless smashed windows of Jewish-owned establishments, left approximately 100 Jews dead, 7,500 Jewish businesses damaged and hundreds of synagogues, homes, schools and graveyards vandalized. An estimated 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, many of whom were then sent to concentration camps for several months; they were released when they promised to leave Germany. Kristallnacht represented a dramatic escalation of the campaign started by Adolf Hitler in 1933 when he became chancellor to purge Germany of its Jewish population.

The Nazis used the murder of a low-level German diplomat in Paris by a 17-year-old Polish Jew as an excuse to carry out the Kristallnacht attacks. On November 7, 1938, Ernst vom Rath was shot outside the German embassy by Herschel Grynszpan, who wanted revenge for his parents’ sudden deportation from Germany to Poland, along with tens of thousands of other Polish Jews. Following vom Rath’s death, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels ordered German storm troopers to carry out violent riots disguised as “spontaneous demonstrations” against Jewish citizens. Local police and fire departments were told not to interfere. In the face of all the devastation, some Jews, including entire families, committed suicide.

In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, the Nazis blamed the Jews and fined them 1 billion marks (or $400 million in 1938 dollars) for vom Rath’s death. As repayment, the government seized Jewish property and kept insurance money owed to Jewish people. In its quest to create a master Aryan race, the Nazi government enacted further discriminatory policies that essentially excluded Jews from all aspects of public life.

Over 100,000 Jews fled Germany for other countries after Kristallnacht. The international community was outraged by the violent events of November 9 and 10. Some countries broke off diplomatic relations in protest, but the Nazis suffered no serious consequences, leading them to believe they could get away with the mass murder that was the Holocaust, in which an estimated 6 million European Jews died.

Also on This Day

American Revolution

Sumter evades Wemyss in South Carolina, 1780

Automotive

Robert McNamara becomes president of Ford Motor Company, 1960

Civil War

Burnside assumes command of the Union Army of the Potomac, 1862

Cold War

East Germany opens the Berlin Wall, 1989

Crime

A Sunday school teacher murders his family and goes undercover for 18 years, 1971

Disaster

Fire rips through Boston, 1872

General Interest

Roosevelt travels to Panama, 1906

Nazis suppressed in Munich, 1923

Sartre renounces communists, 1956

The Great Northeast Blackout, 1965

Hollywood

Kodak Theatre, new home of Oscars, opens, 2001

Literary

Best-selling Millennium trilogy author Stieg Larsson dies at 50, 2004

Music

Willie Nelson’s assets are seized by the IRS, 1990

Old West

Followers of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse identified as hostile, 1875

Presidential

Teddy Roosevelt establishes a naval base in the Philippines, 1901

Sports

Army and Notre Dame fight to a draw, 1946

Vietnam War

Antiwar protestor sets himself afire, 1965

Captain Lance Sijan shot down over North Vietnam, 1967

Supreme Court refuses to rule on legality of Vietnam War, 1970

World War I

Australian warship Sydney sinks German Emden , 1914

World War II

“The Night of Broken Glass”, 1938

This Week in History, Nov 9 – Nov 15

Nov 09, 1938

Nazis launch Kristallnacht

Nov 10, 1969

Sesame Street debuts

Nov 11, 1918

World War I ends

Nov 12, 1954

Ellis Island closes

Nov 13, 1982

Vietnam Veterans Memorial dedicated

Nov 14, 1851

Moby-Dick published

Nov 15, 1867

First stock ticker debuts

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