What's The Time, Mr Wolf?
2025/01/22
I have only ever set my watch to the closest minute, never feeling the need to get those pesky seconds correct. The clock on my phone doesn’t even give seconds, so, without a watch, I’m not even losing any degree of accuracy. You don’t have to manually set a smart phone’s time, and I’ve always assumed that modern smartphone time was accurate.
My current wristwatch is the popular Casio W800HG, which promises a ten year battery life, a light up display, and water resistance up to 100m. Amazon reviewer “onwa” (verified purchase) reports that, on average, time on the watch drifts by a little more than a second each week. Is that good?
For most of my day to day activity this degree of accuracy is perfectly good. In my work, we deal with time to the tenth of a millisecond when looking at latency of an internet connection, so by this standard it would very poor. Looking back into history, for George Harrison – inventor of the first marine chronometer – and generations of seafarers, that difference is worth 0.25 degrees of longitude. A degree of longitude is the equivalent of sixty nautical miles at the equator, so after a months sailing you might be out by quite some distance in your tracking, and possibly out of pocket. Losing a degree of longitude would have put John Harrison you out of the running for even third place prize set in the Longitude Act (1714) by the British government.
Latitude, by Dava Sobel, is the story of the creation of accurate clocks. That is to say accurate in all possible conditions. A maritime chronometer, as they became known, needs to be accurate when exposed to changing temperatures, pressures, movement, and even variation in gravity itself that such a device can expect to be exposed to when sailing the globe. While latitude could be easily computed with a sextant and the sun at noon, longitude is far more difficult. There were essentially two candidate strategies. The first was to develop a more sophisticated system of astronomical observations. The second was to build the reliable maritime chronometer. The first option appealed to those who enjoyed astronomy (and there were many indeed in the 17th and 18th centuries), the second would be far simpler and appeal to the sailors who would use them.
John Harrison was the “Lone Genius” horologist who rose to the challenge. Most of Sobel’s books is devoted to his life, his clocks, his genius, and most of all his difficulty claiming the longitude prize, even as his clocks won over the sailors who navigated by them. In part, this was due to Harrison’s own perfectionism, and partly this was due to Big Astronomy’s certainty that clocks could not be the right solution when the stars were surely the most reliable guides.
Longitude seems to believe that the reader will be hooked on the injustices Harrison suffered in trying to claim the prize that was rightfully his. Who doesn’t enjoy a frustrated genius? But Longitude is at it’s best when it manages to get away from this tired narrative arc. I like personalities as much as the next man or woman, but the petty squabbles just read as tiresome. There is so much richer material here. The chapter devoted to describing the world before ready access to latitude alone is captivating. Then there are actual challenges involved in making a reliable chronometer, which I will generously assume involves so much of interest – history, science, and culture – that Sobel is simply preventing it taking over the book completely. Then there is the subsequent popularization of reliable pocketwatches as craftsmen developed the means to start producing them, if not in mass, at least in serious numbers. This discussion, which comes at the end, begs the question of how we get from there, to here, and the clock on my smart phone.
The state of the art in timekeeping is the atomic clock, which uses the quivering, shivering idiosyncrasies of physics at the molecular level to keep track of the seconds. International Atomic Time is kept by over 450 of these clocks distributed across 80 national laboratories. My phone plays its own version of What’s The Time, Mr Wolf with these atomic clocks, getting sporadic updates to maintain its own pizoelectric crystal. But while an atomic clock can be accurate to 10^-16 seconds, time.gov tells me that my phone is 1.889s out. In nautical terms, that could be a shipwreck.
Podsnappery
2024/10/18
If you spend long enough in academia and if you try hard enough, then you will get to taste the injustice of having your very good work rejected, out of hand, with inscrutable rational, by some fancy journal. The correct way to respond is not to respond at all. This is the professional response. But what would you have to say, if you really could respond without fear of professional consequences?
In the 1960s, the neurologist Oliver Sacks had success treating patients with encephalitis lethargica or “sleeping sickness” with a new drug, L-DOPA. Some of these patients had been in a coma-like state for over 40 years, and the treatment he was trying had a dramatic effect, awakening them from their dormancy. He wrote a book about it, and the book became a movie. The movie won an Oscar. His work was not well received by the Journal of the American Medical Association, however.
Last month the New Yorker printed a selection of Sacks’ letters from this period, including a response to the rejection of his manuscript.
I need scarcely say that I was at first distressed, and even shocked, that innumerable observations based on years of daily contact with patients . . . could be so ignorantly and wantonly dismissed, or “wished away”: the attitude immortalized in Dickens’ Mr. Podsnap (“I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!” . . . ). Your consultant(s) do not make . . . any substantive criticisms of my work, and have therefore descended . . . into petty jibing, pomposity, vapid rhetoric—in a word, Podsnappery. Indeed, if I did not know it directly, I could infer the importance of my own work from the very intensity of this threatened, denying, and defensive reaction. . . .
Another thing we lost, perhaps, with the end of hand written correspondence.
Dunktacular
2024/05/17
Have you ever listened to a podcast? Then likely you might have heard some podcasters imploring you to leave a review. Because it really makes a difference! They even read their reviews! After listening to so many podcasts, I finally felt the urge to express myself in this way and wrote a review for If Books Could Kill. But it seems that the big place for podcast reviews is Apple Podcasts, and I’m not in that particular walled garden. An interesting way to learn people aren’t really interested in your opinion. So instead I left my review on some strange podcast reviewing site. And now I’m leaving it here.
I grew up in England, but came of age as Youtube became ascendant. As a result I was the among the first generation of British youth to be suddenly consuming unpasturized American culture. I can think of no more heightened example of this than bingeing highlights of the NBA slam dunk contest. Total exposure could not have lasted more than an hour. The worlds greatest b-ballers performed all manner of dunks from incredible heights, through flaming hoops, in the final stage of High Altitude, Low Opening parachute jump. But all dunks are pretty much the same, however you dress them up. The spectacle is forever wrestling with the hollowness of the exercise.
If Books Could Kill constantly feels like it is in danger of becoming the Slam Dunk Contest. The premise of the show is that our all star cast of based, lefty, bien pensant podcasting hosts, Michael and Peter review the most popular non-fiction titles that have shaped our discourse and inevitably done a great deal of damage along the way. Because, as it turns out, most of these books are bad. There is the long line up of air-port self-help, pop-psychology, pop-economics, and sub-business school business books laid out for said hosts to, well, dunk on.
I am not misleading you when I say that we have an all-star pair of podcasting hosts. Each have respectively had their previous podcasts receive major press, plaudits, and followings. So does this podcast achieve the sum of its parts? While their other podcasts – You’re Wrong About, Maintenance Phase, and 5-4 – all had clear, coherent theses that were deeply important that roughly fall into a revisionist movement in journalism that has blossomed in journalism, IBCK mostly has to grasp at the claim to understanding a broader conservative project. Fair enough for some of the books they cover. But I once heard two people in a car park complaining that prisoners live rent free and get TV. I wouldn’t say that I stumbled upon part of the “conservative project”.
The fact is that I like books. I listen to the NYRB Classics podcast. I listen to the 99% invisible episodes where they are going through the Power Broker. I’m working my way through ReJoyce, the forever incomplete Ulysses close reading podcast. I have listened to multiple Gene Wolfe podcasts. I’ve listened to a lot of the podcast where they read through all of Infinite Jest, and now Inherent Vice. I cannot emphasize enough that the premise of IBCK is forever putting the podcast in danger of total doom because they are dealing with the least interesting books in the world. It is a breath of fresh air when there is a writer featured who either can write, has written interesting things, or just defies any kind of expectation.
The big open secret in non-fiction is that there is no fact checking aside from what the author has commissioned themselves. There is some residual idea that we all got from somewhere that things being in books confers some authority, but for anyone paying attention, that has never been true. There is a wide net that could be cast here, beyond the Conservative Project. But whatever. Five stars. There was dunking.