Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

In my day, never was longer.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Let there be snark.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

You are here: Home / Economics / Free Markets Solve Everything / It’s 5 O’clock in France

It’s 5 O’clock in France

by | 54 Comments

This post is in: 

Radio station WWVB is 50 years old today.

Every night, while millions of Americans are fast asleep, clocks and wristwatches across the country wake up and lock on to a radio signal beamed from the base of the Rocky Mountains. The signal contains a message that keeps the devices on time, helping to make sure their owners keep to their schedules and aren’t late for work the next day.

The broadcast comes from WWVB, a station run by the National Institute for Standards and Technology. WWVB marks half a century as the nation’s official time broadcaster on July 5. Together with its sister station, WWV, which is about to hit 90 years in service, NIST radio has been an invisible piece of American infrastructure that has advanced industries from entertainment to telecommunications. (WWV’s broadcast includes a wider range of information, including maritime weather warnings and solar storm alerts).

When I was nerdy kid, I remember tuning my shortwave radio to WWV to get the correct time from the atomic clock and thinking it was pretty cool that my watch could be set correctly down to the second. Now there are an estimated 50 million clocks and wristwatches that use WWVB to do that automatically. I’m surprised this clear case of time socialism hasn’t been privatized or sequestered out of existence.

Reader Interactions

54Comments

  3. 3.

    JustRuss

    I’m surprised this clear case of time socialism hasn’t been privatized or sequestered out of existence.

    I’ve thought the same thing about GPS. Although from what I understand they’ve lost a few satellites and if they don’t start launching new ones the system could go down. should be fun to see how funding for that plays out.

  4. 4.

    gbear

    I quit listening because they’d never play any of my requests. Burning me on 25 or 6 to 4 was the final straw.

  5. 5.

    raven

    The big clock on the wall in the pool area of the Y is broken. As the minute hand sweeps up to 12 it stalls at 5 till and just hangs. Suddenly it will just jump 10 dam minutes! Make me crazy during my laps swims.

  7. 7.

    Sayne

    After reading this, I pulled up Time.gov and found that my computer was running 3 full seconds behind the real time! I immediately set my computer to sync with time.nist.gov and it’s all better now.

    Whew. Crisis averted.

  8. 8.

    gnomedad

    Millions of illegal immigrants are stealing from producers to set their clocks.

  9. 9.

    Steeplejack

    Hey, speaking of France . . .

    DVR Alert!

    TCM is showing all five of François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films starting at 8:00 p.m. EDT tonight. They are rarely screened and are definitely worth checking out.

    8:00 p.m.: The Four Hundred Blows (1959).
    9:45 p.m.: Antoine and Colette (1962).
    10:30 p.m.: Stolen Kisses (1968).
    12:15 a.m.: Bed and Board (1970).
    2:00 a.m.: Love on the Run (1979).

    And then TCM is finishing up at 4:00 a.m. with The Green Room (1978), which for some reason they call The Vanishing Fiancée. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this one, much less on TCM.

    Anyway, it’s a feast for Truffaut fans.

    Roger Ebert (writing in 1971 on the American release of Bed and Board):

    François Truffaut first introduced Antoine in The Four Hundred Blows (1959), his first feature. The character was roughly based on Truffaut’s own youth and adolescence, when he was the next thing to a juvenile delinquent and prowled the streets of Paris.

    The Four Hundred Blows, with Godard’s Breathless (1960) and Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge, inaugurated the French New Wave and changed the face and style of filmmaking almost overnight. But we don’t remember The Four Hundred Blows for historical reasons; we remember it because, for many of us, it was our first taste of personal, almost intimate, filmmaking.

    The Hollywood movies we saw during the 1950s had grown increasingly sterile and clumsy, with a few exceptions, but now here was a new filmmaker with a relaxed and unstudied manner, who recorded the rhythms of life itself, instead of some arthritic plot. He allowed us to spend some time with the boy Antoine, his parents, his school and his moody adolescent terrain. There are some movies that are spoken of in hushed tones as “classics,” and studied joylessly for their perfection, but The Four Hundred Blows will never age like that. It will be one of the movies we can put in a time capsule to convince the next generations that some of us, at least, breathed.

    With the exception of an interim short subject, Truffaut didn’t return to the autobiographical character of Antoine until Stolen Kisses (1968), which once again starred Jean-Pierre Léaud. It was clear with this movie that Truffaut and Antoine had changed a great deal. Stolen Kisses was more on the side of whimsy than pathos, and wasn’t nearly as serious as the earlier film.

    But it was a great film in its own way, showing us young Antoine in a variety of jobs and loves. At the end of The Four Hundred Blows, we expected, I think, that Antoine would grow up to be an extraordinary human being of some sort, but we were wrong. Truffaut aged him into a pleasant, rather ordinary young man in his early twenties, and now, with Bed and Board, Antoine has actually become bourgeois.

    [. . .]

    Truffaut himself has changed enormously in the past decade, and Antoine’s story has become an autobiography, not of Truffaut’s life, but of his art. You get the feeling from his films that he’s one of the most gentle and civilized of directors, and that he finds the events of ordinary human life just as fascinating as heroic or melodramatic subjects. Bed and Board is one of the most decent and loving films I can remember.

  10. 10.

    NickT

    Every night, while millions of Americans are fast asleep, clocks and wristwatches across the country wake up and lock on to a radio signal beamed from the base of the Rocky Mountains.

    Thanks for the preview of Snowden’s next revelation.

  16. 16.

    me

    @JustRuss: GPS, being part of the military budget, will never be short of money, unlike weather satellites while just as important are part of NOAA’s dwindling budget.

  17. 17.

    Anya

    Totally OT, but the Newsmax headlines don’t have anything about the IRS “scandal.” Does that mean wingnuts gave up on it?

  19. 19.

    bill d

    @Just Some Fuckhead:

    So Obama controls what time it is, that should make the wingers sleep well at night.

    Next week in Congress….a demand to return to the sundial, God’s clock.

    p.s. – I heard that WWVB is intentionally 5 minutes fast so nobody will run late

  20. 20.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @MattF:

    His worthless war criminal head has not kerploded, so Lady Gaga hasn’t done enough yet.

    Also, too, pants shitting coward Ted Nugent says he’s thinking about running for President.

    FSM does not love us that much.

  21. 21.

    Steeplejack

    @Anya:

    Yeah, I think they have. Somebody in one of the threads downstairs cited a quote from a Republican senator GOP-splainin’ that it was “unlikely” that Obama had targeted the Tea Party groups.

    ETA: Link to NickT’s comment from earlier today.

  23. 23.

    Comrade Jake

    @Anya: I caught a little of Neil Cavuto’s show on Fox last week, and he was talking about the IRS scandal and the recent revelations that they were looking into progressive groups as well. He had some half-wit on pointing out that maybe these progressive groups were also ones who were opposed to the Obama administration, so it still fits that the WH was after them.

    Nonetheless, Neil did not seem to have his heart in it any longer. I think it’s going to die, much like Benghazi and APgate.

  24. 24.

    Jerzy Russian

    @JustRuss:

    I’ve thought the same thing about GPS. Although from what I understand they’ve lost a few satellites and if they don’t start launching new ones the system could go down. should be fun to see how funding for that plays out.

    I also heard that the star catalogs need updating, as uncertainties in the proper motions of various reference stars start to accumulate into larger and larger errors. NASA killed an astrometric mission known as FAME a while back, and as far as I know, nothing similar is in the pipeline. The Europeans have the Gaia mission that is scheduled to launch this year.

  25. 25.

    Mike G

    @Comrade Jake:

    Now it’s time for teatards to take the next step:
    Admit that Grand Theft Issa blatantly lied to them, that they are stupid and gullible to be fooled by such transparent bullshit. A commitment to the truth means not repeatedly believing people who tell you comforting lies that you want to hear.

    Not holding my breath.

  26. 26.

    bill d

    @Mike G:

    Right! They need to primary Issa with a real conservative who will get some scalps with made up BS, what a failure.

    :P

  27. 27.

    Yatsuno

    @Comrade Jake: There is really only one goal of te IRS scandal: to give the wingnuts an excuse to cut their budget and make tax collection even harder. It’s already bad enough after a three year hiring freeze. But no better way to starve the beast than to take away the main food source.

  28. 28.

    Yatsuno

    @Mike G: Yesbut…he hates the blah guy in the White House plus he gets the pig for the numerous defence contractors in his district. No matter what he does he’ll be safe. Issa unfortunately will have that seat until he decides to do something else. Hell they couldn’t even use him being an Arab against him.

  29. 29.

    Suffern ACE

    @Anya: if the nutters on my FB feed are any indication, the new scandal is that Obama told college kids not to celebrate the Fourth of July. It’s a seasonal scandal.

  30. 30.

    Ultraviolet Thunder

    Some of us use government time signals every day. I use Time.gov to regulate my mechanical watches. and have the widget open in a window at all times. Before that I used a Radio Shack SW radio to pick up WWVB or WWV (10mhz and 5mhz, IIRC).
    http://time.gov/widget.html

  31. 31.

    Soonergrunt

    @JustRuss: From the GPS.Gov page:

    The GPS space segment consists of a constellation of satellites transmitting radio signals to users. The Air Force manages the constellation to ensure the availability of at least 24 GPS satellites, 95% of the time. For the past several years, the Air Force has been flying 31 operational GPS satellites, plus 3-4 decommissioned satellites (“residuals”) that can be reactivated if needed.

    They are currently building the Block III satellites that will start replacing the oldest of the Block II birds that comprise the constellation.

  33. 33.

    Old Dan and Little Ann

    @Suffern ACE: My former roommate in college posted that “Obama voters celebrating the 4th of July is like Atheists celebrating Christmas.” I’d much like to defriend this doucebag but he is a perfect window into the mind of a lunatic.

  34. 34.

    ? Martin

    @JustRuss:

    I’ve thought the same thing about GPS. Although from what I understand they’ve lost a few satellites and if they don’t start launching new ones the system could go down.

    Privatized GPS would be awesome. There’d be 4 competing satellite networks, each incompatible with the others and only about 40% operational because one GPS network is expensive, but four is competition.

  35. 35.

    raven

    @Mike G: In finishing up the 1st season of Homeland it seems that “Issa” is a dude killed by a drone strike.

  37. 37.

    PurpleGirl

    @Old Dan and Little Ann: I know a couple of atheists who celebrate Christmas — at least they have decorated trees and do big dinners Christmas day with family and friends. Why? The dinners are parties (we all like parties) and pine trees are fun to decorate and pretty to look at. Besides, they feel they are honoring a very old tradition of celebrating light returning. They just don’t believe in a sky god or go to a religious observance of the day/season.

  38. 38.

    Robert Sneddon

    @? Martin: Five competing networks, sort of. There’s the US military’s Navstar GPS, Russia’s GLONASS (inherited from the Soviet Union), the EU’s Galileo system, the Chinese Beidou system and India is launching their own regional positioning system based on geostationary satellites (not actually global but covering a good chunk of the Indian Ocean, SE Asia, eastern Africa etc.)

    The Proton-M launch from Baikonur that failed a couple of days ago was carrying three next-generation GLONASS satellites so the Russian constellation is going to be a bit depauperate for a while. The first Galileo production satellites should launch this autumn to accompany the technology demonstrators and placeholders already in orbit.

  39. 39.

    Steeplejack

    @gogol’s wife:

    There can never be too much Truffaut! He is perhaps my favorite director (although I am usually more a fan of individual movies than of directors), and the high point of my checkered career as a newspaper reporter was when I interviewed him in the late ’70s.

    I love that they’re showing all the Antoine Doinel movies in a block. That’s several hundred dollars’ worth of Criterion DVDs free for the viewing/recording.

    For others who are interested, here is the TCM page on Truffaut and his movies this month.

  41. 41.

    Origuy

    @Robert Sneddon: The iPhone 4S and later Apple products can accept both GPS and GLONASS signals, a requirement to sell in Russia. GLONASS is particularly good at covering the polar regions. When I was in Moscow a few months ago, I was amazed at how quickly and precisely my 4S located me.

  42. 42.

    gogol's wife

    @Steeplejack:

    Wow — what was it like to interview him?

    I recently read his whole Hitchcock interview book out loud to my husband while he made dinner every night. It was great fun.

  44. 44.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Origuy: Navstar concentrated on covering areas of interest to the US with most of the constellation orbiting in a wide belt around the equator with only a few birds in a near-polar orbit. The GLONASS constellation went for higher inclination orbits to provide better coverage of Siberia and points north as well as supporting the extensive shipping and fishing operations there. When it is complete Galileo will have similar coverage to GLONASS because a lot of Europe is noticeably further north than the US (where I live in Edinburgh is at the same latitude as the southern end of Hudson Bay, for example).

    Modern GPS receivers will work with Navstar, GLONASS and even Galileo interchangeably, maybe even Beidou too as they use similar frequencies for the receivers and the rest is software processing, no tricky hardware required.

  47. 47.

    Steeplejack

    @gogol’s wife:

    He was very down-to-earth but had a commanding presence. Not like “I’m taking over the room,” more like the kind of person that others would naturally gravitate toward. And he was very patient and articulate in talking about his work, which I’m sure he had done hundreds, if not thousands, of times before.

  49. 49.

    Steeplejack

    @gogol’s wife:

    Some of Trauffaut’s Hitchcock “homage” films are among my favorites. A moment that always kills me is the MacGuffin setup in Mississippi Mermaid. Jean-Claude Belmondo plays a French planter in Africa who orders up a mail-order bride, but when she arrives she looks nothing like the pictures he has been receiving. It’s Catherine Deneuve. And she says: “Are you disappointed?”

    Catherine freakin’ Deneuve. “Why, yes, you’re not the mousy brunette with whom I have been corresponding. I shall write a stern letter to the company.” Yeah, no.

    Once you get past that monumental improbability, the movie is really good. But that’s the whole point of a MacGuffin.

  50. 50.

    mellowjohn

    iirc, several years ago congressional Rs wanted to defund the national weather service “because you can get the same information from the weather channel.”

  51. 51.

    smintheus

    Of all the things I’d tune into for friends with my shortwave back in the ’70s, WWV was the only station that really interested them. Perhaps I needed better friends.

  52. 52.

    Luthe

    Texas Republicans want to defund NIST. How else will they retroactively pass bills after midnight if Big Government is crushing them under the jackboot of correct time?

  53. 53.

    steverino

    @Davis X. Machina:
    Allow me to promote my website: http://www.qmss.com

    Being a submarine Quartermaster the only use I made of a sextant in the heat of battle was for horizontal sextant angles while piloting without periscopes; but I used me some Nautical Almanac and 229, and gave some awesome training in port.

    You don’t want to know what submarine navigation is like now. All I can say is, breaking the point on your pencil is no longer a concern.

  54. 54.

    steverino

    When I first heard of GPS-enabled watches, I thought they used the time from the satellites to set themselves. No, because GPS-time is different from UTC. So why not use an offset? IDK.

    My NIST-set watch doesn’t pick up the signal in Florida, I’ve found (Orlando region). At home in CT I place it on the dresser carefully aligned for the strongest signal. And use it to set my wind-up ship’s bell clock and real Black Forest cuckoo clock. I also have a wind-up 24-hour dial Chelsea US Gov’t clock surplussed when they went quartz.

    I still recall the SN that broke the wardroom 7-day wind-up ship’s bell clock: he recalled from QM school that a chronometer was wound daily with “seven-and-a-half half-turns” and by God if this isn’t a chronometer then what is? He tried his darndest to wind it daily.

Comments are closed.