I can say from direct experience doing research with hollow-core fibres that they are not easy to splice either to each other or to standard fibre. Imagine trying to use heat to melt together a pipe and a solid cylinder without creating a mess.
I must be missing something. This is recommending folders are numbered. Is that it? Is this a "system" now? I think that may have been used previously - for example by humanity for the last 5,000 years or so.
"the BIPM collects time measurements from national timing laboratories around the world"
I'm really interested in how this is done with multiple clocks over a distance. Can anyone explain? It feels like it would be very difficult since asking "what time is it there?" at the timescale of atomic clocks is kind of a bit meaningless? And that's before considering the absolute local nature of time and the impossibility of a general universal time per relativity.
The term of art you want for searchengineering is “time transfer”.
There are a variety of mechanisms:
* fibre links when the labs are close enough
* two-way satellite time transfer, when they are further apart
* in the past, literally carrying an atomic clock from A to B (they had to ask the pilot for precise details of the flight so that they could integrate relativistic effects of the speed and height)
* there’s an example in the talk, of how Essen and Markowitz compared their measurements by using a shared reference, the WWV time signal.
I believe an important aspect is that the actual time offset between the clocks doesn't matter all that much - it is the drift between them you care about.
True UTC is essentially an arbitrary value. Syncing up with multiple clocks is done to account for a single clock being a bit slow or fast. It doesn't matter if the clock you are syncing with is 1.34ms behind, as long as it is always 1.34ms behind. If it's suddenly 1.35ms behind, there's 0.01ms of drift between them and you have to correct for that. And if that 1.34ms-going-to-1.35ms is actually 1.47ms-going-to-1.48ms, the outcome will be exactly the same.
This means you could sync up using a simple long-range radio signal. As long as the time between transmission and reception for each clock stays constant, it is pretty trivial to determine clock drift. Something like the DCF77 and WWVB transmitters seems like a reasonable choice - provided you are able to deal with occasional bounces off the ionosphere.
Of course these days you'd probably just have all the individual clocks somehow reference GPS. It's globally available, after all.
It isn’t just the difference in rate. The main content of Circular T https://www.bipm.org/en/time-ftp/circular-t is the time offset of the various national realisations of UTC. Another important aspect is characterizing the stability of each clock, which determines the weighting of its contribution to UTC.
It's mad that this even needs said. A company's aim should be to be sustainable and profitable, not to be a receptacle for capital. Some companies need external capital to get to that point, particularly hardware or those operating in slow-adopting markets. If you don't need it, don't take it.
A couple of lifetimes ago, a business mentor of mine taught me a truth that has served me very well.
There is a correct amount of money for starting a business, and it's probably less than you think it is. Too much money in a startup tends to gum up the works and can kill a business just as dead as not having enough. If you have too much money, you're not only going to blow it on things that don't matter, but when you do, you're likely to do so in a way that incurs ongoing costs.
Things like leasing fancier offices than you need (or, in some cases, leasing any office space at all), hiring more people than you need, etc.
As he put it, if you're starting a business and aren't worrying about how you're covering your expenses next quarter, you probably have too much money.
To add on, a company who spends a lot of money on frivolous things or over-hires will need to pay the internal cost of downsizing when the time inevitably comes. That means layoffs, fewer employee benefits for those still employed, and general tightening of the belt.
There is a huge cost when you let go of people who would otherwise be kept on payroll if you could continue to pay them. You will get fewer internal referrals to new hires and remaining staff become less engaged in their work. There is additional long lasting damage to your staff as a whole who survived the layoff this time. The culture at the company shifts and never fully recovers.
I don’t think businesses always fully appreciate the long term cost and damage layoffs do to small and medium sized companies, but see headcount reduction as a simple way to reduce its own costs.
Plus you will tend to take committing decisions like hiring, location, or business goals that will limit how much you explore alternative paths.
Having a team to manage forces you to find problems they can solve, which is not necessarily where the money is.
You have a css/js developer? Ok I have to find frontend tasks now. Etc
Yeah sometimes it becomes clear founders forget the purpose of a company is to make money/turn a profit and not just to repeatedly raise money and be famous. I have worked at a company that forgot this. It feels kind of surreal sometimes.
That's one view of what a company should do. Another is that it should become famous enough to attract the attention of a FAANG and get bought out ASAP, making the founders multimillionaires before they turn 30. It's the techbro lottery. Many will play, few will win.
Surreal indeed. It blows my mind to see investors repeatedly try to propel the same business model (like electric scooter sharing) far past the point of reason. The founders can surprisingly turn around, start something else, and get showered with money again.
It feels completely disconnected from reality, a very abstract way of thinking about money and business.
Does that happen sometimes? Surely. But more often than not, founder led companies who have personal attachment to the outcomes deliver far better than some self-interested, career stepping-stone, decision-by-committee corporate blob. See Nvidia, Facebook, Stripe, and Tesla compared to Intel, IBM, GM, and PayPal.
Not arguing that at all. I fully agree. There are a lot of smaller startups that fail to get past the “tribe” level due to founder’s syndrome though, among many other factors. It just reminded me of that right off the bat.
