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.
Just Some Fuckhead
The market should determine what time it is.
Baud
47% of people think they are entitled to free time.
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.
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.
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.
raven
@gbear: Sitting crosslegged on the floor. . .
eta Have you seen the Chicago-Earth Wind and Fire at the Hollywood Bowl DVD? Really good. 25 6 to 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwxyP06ZPu4
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.
gnomedad
Millions of illegal immigrants are stealing from producers to set their clocks.
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.
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):
NickT
Thanks for the preview of Snowden’s next revelation.
Steeplejack
@gbear:
Well played. But, seriously, until oldies stations caught on it was the only place I could hear “Five O’Clock World.”
Bonus: “Time Has Come Today.”
Comrade Mary
Here in Canada, all CBC radio stations have broadcast the National Research Council time signal once a day (1 PM Eastern).
What it sounded like in 1974 (although we started in 1939),
How it works.
Lavocat
French time is not merely better, it is transcendent. Just ask Proust.
Steeplejack
@Lavocat:
I thought he lost it and then had trouble finding it. Rather careless, what?
MattF
And when your inner nerd needs to go beyond the ‘usual’, there’s this:
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/publications/docs/exp_supp.php
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.
Anya
Totally OT, but the Newsmax headlines don’t have anything about the IRS “scandal.” Does that mean wingnuts gave up on it?
MattF
@Anya: Speaking of Newsmax, we should also take note of what Lady Gaga has done to Allen West.
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
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.
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.
Baud
@Steeplejack:
Worse than Watergate.
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.
Jerzy Russian
@JustRuss:
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Soonergrunt
@JustRuss: From the GPS.Gov page:
They are currently building the Block III satellites that will start replacing the oldest of the Block II birds that comprise the constellation.
NickT
@Suffern ACE:
Dare I ask where this particular rhinestone was first mined?
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.
? Martin
@JustRuss:
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.
raven
@Mike G: In finishing up the 1st season of Homeland it seems that “Issa” is a dude killed by a drone strike.
gogol's wife
@Steeplejack:
They’re going to be doing Truffaut festivals every Friday in the month of July.
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.
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.
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.
Steeplejack
@gogol’s wife:
Also, if you like Truffaut, check out Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000). A great movie that feels very Truffaut-like to me.
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.
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.
Davis X. Machina
@JustRuss: I have my sextant, radio, stopwatch, Nautical Almanac and HO 229 handy. Call me.
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.
morley bolero
@gbear: Hahaha!
Steeplejack
@Davis X. Machina:
What? No astrolabe? Patzer.
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.
gogol's wife
@Steeplejack:
That’s neat.
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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.
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.