In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Magnus Danielson writes: >From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Tim Shoppa) >Subject: Re: [time-nuts] List of time synchronization hardware and software >Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 20:20:55 -0500 >Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >> James Maynard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> > Brooke Clarke wrote: >> > > Astronomical methods, such as sundials might deserve a place on the list. >> > Indeed. Sundials, or menhirs, such as those at Stonehenge! >> >> Even better, pulsars. They have a period that is usually the same order >> of magnitude as a second, and some of them are regular enough that they >> are similar in stability as an atomic clock (how many of us have >> cesium beam tubes that will last for billions of years, hmmm?)
Pulsars were considered for timekeeping several times in the past, and in every instance the winning argument was "You want to base our timekeeping on some cosmic phenomena we don't even know what is ?". I guess we think we know what they are now, but the argument is still pretty powerful as we don't know how stable we can expect pulsar rates to be in the long term. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list [email protected] https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
