Live from Austin!

I got a new watch. Again. I bought my last watch in 2001. There was nothing wrong with it. However, Casio brought out a new version that drops the moon phase and tide graph, and instead has 5-band radio atomic clock synchronization. As you can see, it’s not a major departure, visually speaking. The function of the buttons is slightly rearranged, the actual time is larger and easier to read, the time zones don’t have editable names, and the alarm now has a snooze function. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same watch. Still titanium, solar powered, waterproof. But with the atomic clock synchronization, it’s one step closer to being the perfect watch–which, by my definition, is an indestructable watch that requires zero maintenance. I have a mild obsession with accurate timekeeping. The first watch I ever remember owning was the Timex I had as a child. It was a simple analog watch that required regular winding. Its clockwork mechanism was fairly awful as far as accuracy goes, and I had to adjust it each morning. Next, I got one of the first ever digital watches: a TI-500 from Texas Instruments. Mine was brown plastic with a brown leather strap. Since I was a kid at the time, it got scratched up pretty quickly. It also ate batteries. Still, I loved it; and I bet if I’d kept it, it would sell for a bundle on eBay. But technology was changing rapidly, and before long I had my first LCD watch, a Casio. Casio would soon take over the watch market, almost destroying the Swiss watch industry. My contribution to this process was one of these: That was the watch that never died. It lasted me through the 80s. I also had Casio calculators, but I’m happy to say I never had a calculator watch. I just wasn’t that geeky Since I love swimming and tend to be forgetful of whether I’m wearing a watch, I eventually upgraded to a waterproof Casio, again with a metal case and strap. I don’t remember too much about that one, except that once the battery needed replacing, it stopped being waterproof. Update: I’ve found out you can actually still buy the waterproof metal Casio I had. In addition, as the 90s arrived the backlash had happened, and digital watches were about as fashionable as flared trousers. So I looked for a watch that was waterproof but didn’t need batteries. For a while I wore a Swatch automatic. Aside from the lack of batteries needing replacement, I liked that it was totally unlike any other watch I had owned. Also, the back was transparent, so you could see the mechanism. It kept pretty good time, but still needed weekly adjustments. So, then came the Seiko Kinetic, which I wrote about before. Then, back to Casio. And now, atomic. I don’t know why atomic time synchronization is so seductive to me. It’s not like I need that level of accuracy in my timekeeping. Nevertheless, all the computers are synched via NTP, and we have a couple of radio synchronized clocks too. I think there’s just something fascinating about time, and about the idea of knowing it precisely. When Harper’s recently published an issue that had a whole feature about the debate over leap seconds, it was like they had published it just for me. Part of the fascination is that time is so mysterious. From the point of view of the laws of physics, you can treat it as another dimension; and physics itself doesn’t seem to care about which direction time flows. Yet our perception is that time is utterly unlike any other dimension, that it has a clear direction–and nobody can explain why that is the case. We simply don’t know what time is, even though we can measure it with very high precision. So now I know what time it is. For sure.

From the Wall St Journal:

 Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana’s 92 counties set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year, in part because farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the morning dark. But many residents came to hate falling in and out of sync with businesses and residents in neighboring states and prevailed upon the Indiana Legislature to put the entire state on daylight-saving time beginning in the spring of 2006.

Indiana’s change of heart gave University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time. Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in weather from one year to the next.

Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings.

“I’ve never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this,” says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this month.

A 2007 study by economists Hendrik Wolff and Ryan Kellogg of the temporary extension of daylight-saving in two Australian territories for the 2000 Summer Olympics also suggested the clock change increases energy use.

So there we have it. Dicking around with the clocks twice a year and making life awkward for software developers is not only a waste of time, it’s also a waste of energy and money, at least in places where people have air conditioning in summer.

Once I succeed in becoming supreme dictator, the following rules will be enforced on pain of imprisonment:

• All measurements will be in SI units or derived metric quantities.

• All dates and times will be written in ISO8601 formats, and measured in UTC. A special exemption will be made for astronomers, who will be allowed to continue to use Astronomical Time.

• All times will be in UTC, and hence “daylight savings” will be illegal.

• All paper sizes will follow the DIN A and B series.

and the rule I’m adding today:

• E-mail clients will be prohibited from deleting non-spam e-mail.

Disk space is cheap, really cheap. I got a silent 200GB Seagate hard drive for $99. That’s big enough to hold an entire lifetime’s e-mail, and then some. You do not need to delete e-mail. At most, you need to move it from your regular inbox to some kind of archive.

In particular—and here we see the motivation for the prohibition—you should never ask anyone to re-send you an e-mail on the grounds that you deleted it. Deleting e-mail because you’re too lazy to file it, and then whining to the sender that you need another copy, merely proves that you are a rude and insensitive clod. We all have enough crap in our inboxes without having to deal with e-mail from you asking for the same information over and over again. If your e-mail client doesn’t have a search option and multiple folders, get one that does. Even web mail has search and folders these days.

Also, if the company you work for has a policy that your e-mail be deleted periodically, then the pain of that policy falls on you, not me. It’s up to you to make sure you copy out all useful information from your e-mail and file it somewhere permanent. I will not waste my time putting up with your corporate bureaucracy; believe me, I have more than enough to deal with already.