It's a storage thing. You can make it so that the parts fit together better in pieces, then you assemble the pieces in theatre during deployment, so you have more drones in combat per mothership.
It's not like taking crude, cracking it, then refining the plastics, yadda yadda yadda. It's more an fast automated assembly thing.
Inside of a submersible warship really is not the place to be conducting assembly of sensitive electronics, and just because you call it "fast automated" doesn't mean it's either of those enough to be feasible in combat situations.
There are many backup clocks/clusters that NIST uses as redundancies all around Boulder too, no need to even go up to Fort Collins. As in, NIST has fiber to a few at CU and a few commercial companies, last I checked. They're used in cases just like this one.
Fun facts about The clock:
You can't put anything in the room or take anything out. That's how sensitive the clock is.
The room is just filled with asbestos.
The actual port for the actual clock, the little metal thingy that is going buzz, buzz, buzz with voltage every second on the dot? Yeah, that little port isn't actually hooked up to anything, as again, it's so sensitive (impedance matching). So they use the other ports on the card for actual data transfer to the rest of the world. They do the adjustments so it's all fine in the end. But you have to define something as the second, and that little unused port is it.
You can take a few pictures in the cramped little room, but you can't linger, as again, just your extra mass and gravity affects things fairly quickly.
If there are more questions about time and timekeeping in general, go ahead and ask, though I'll probably get back to them a bit later today.
I'm the Manager of the Computing group at JILA at CU, where utcnist*.colorado.edu used to be housed. Those machines were, for years, consistently the highest bandwidth usage computers on campus.
Unfortunately, the HP cesium clock that backed the utcnist systems failed a few weeks ago, so they're offline. I believe the plan is to decommission those servers anyway - NIST doesn't even list them on the NTP status page anymore, and Judah Levine has retired (though he still comes in frequently). Judah told me in the past that the typical plan in this situation is that you reference a spare HP clock with the clock at NIST, then drive it over to JILA backed by some sort of battery and put it in the rack, then send in the broken one for refurb (~$20k-$40k; new box is closer to $75k). The same is true for the WWVB station, should its clocks fail.
There is fiber that connects NIST to CU (it's part of the BRAN - Boulder Research and Administration Network). Typically that's used when comparing some of the new clocks at JILA (like Jun Ye's strontium clock) to NIST's reference. Fun fact: Some years back the group was noticing loss due to the fiber couplers in various closets between JILA & NIST... so they went to the closets and directly spliced the fibers to each other. It's now one single strand of fiber between JILA & NIST Boulder.
That fiber wasn't connected to the clock that backed utcnist though. utcnist's clock was a commercial cesium clock box from HP that was also fed by GPS. This setup was not particularly sensitive to people being in the room or anything.
Another fun fact: utcnist3 was an FPGA developed in-house to respond to NTP traffic. Super cool project, though I didn't have anything to do with it, haha.
Now if the (otherwise very kind) guy in charge of the Bureau international des poids et mesures at Sèvres who did not let me have a look at the refrerence for the kilogram and meter could change his mind, I would appreciate. For a physicist this is kinda like a cathedral.
If you ever are in Paris, I can't recommend the Musee des Arts et Metiers enough.
I believe they have the several reference platinum kilograms that are now out of spec. [1]
they also have the original actual Foucault pendulum that was used to demonstrate Earth's rotation. (and a replica doing a live demo, of course)
They have so many incredible artifacts (for weights and measures but also so much more: engineering, physics, civil engineering, machining,...)
I don't know if you will be reading this, but I am just back from that museum. Thank you very much for the information.
I spent 4 hours to there and was surprised to see so many tourists, this is not a place I expected people visiting Paris to go to. There were no crowds though.
The top part is really great, you get to see how much people did with so little. So is the chemistry part.
I found the steel replica of the kilogramme and the meter, and of course the Foucault pendulum (in the neighboring refurbished church).
This is truly an interesting museum, on part with the museum of discoveries (musée de la découverte) which is unfortunately close now for a few years for renovations (or at lest was recently planned to be closed). Much better than La Vilette.
Ahhh, thank you for the tip. I live in Versailles and usually go to museums for art, but this would be wonderful as well.
The Musée de Sèvres (or Bureau des Mesures as it is called now) has the original kilogramme and meter iridium reference, hidden in the basement ;( So if the director has a change of heart, I am all in!
>The actual port for the actual clock, the little metal thingy that is going buzz, buzz, buzz with voltage every second on the dot? Yeah, that little port isn't actually hooked up to anything, as again, it's so sensitive (impedance matching). So they use the other ports on the card for actual data transfer to the rest of the world.
Can you restate this part in full technical jargon along with more detail? I'm having a hard time following it
As you can see, the room is clearly not filled with asbestos. Furthermore, the claim is absurd on its face. Asbestos was banned in the U.S. in March 2024 [1] and the clock was commissioned in May 2025.
The rest of the claims are equally questionable. For example:
> The actual port for the actual clock ... isn't actually hooked up to anything ... they use the other ports on the card for actual data transfer
It's hard to make heads or tails of this, but if you read the technical description of the clock you will see that by the time you get to anything in the system that could reasonably be described as a "card" with "ports" you are so far from the business end of the clock that nothing you do could plausibly have an impact on its operation.
> You can't put anything in the room or take anything out. That's how sensitive the clock is.
This claim is also easily debunked using the formula for gravitational time dilation [2]. The accuracy of the clock is ~10^-16. Calculating the mass of an object 1m away from the clock that would produce this effect is left as an exercise, but it's a lot more than the mass of a human. To get a rough idea, the relativistic time dilation on the surface of the earth is <100 μs/day [3]. That is huge by atomic clock standards, but that is the result of 10^24kg of mass. A human is 20 orders of magnitude lighter.
Agreed the stated claims don't seem to make much sense. Using a point mass 1 meter away and (G*M)/(r*c^2) I'm getting that you'd have to stand next to the clock for ~61 years to cause a time dilation due to gravity exceeding 10^-16 seconds.
Actually, it's even worse than that: the design of the clock makes it so that the cesium atoms doing the actual time keeping are in free-fall while they are being observed. So it is physically impossible for any gravitational influence to change the accuracy of the clock.
Hey, I know you got a lot of flack for the article. So, I just wanted to thank you for having the courage to publish it anyways and go through all of that for all of us.
I go back to the study frequently when looking at MRI studies, and it always holds up. It always reminds me to be careful with these things and to try to have other be careful with their results too. Though to me it's a bit of a lampooning, surprisingly it has been the best reminder for me to be more careful with my work.
So thank you for putting yourself through all that. To me, it was worth it.
Many thanks - appreciate the kind words. Thanks also for always working to work with care in your science. It makes all the difference.
Among other challenges, when we first submitted the poster to the Human Brain Mapping conference we got kicked out of consideration because the committee thought we were trolling. One person on the review committee said we actually had a good point and brought our poster back in for consideration. The salmon poster ended up being on a highlight slide at the closing session of the conference!
When someone says: "Source?", is that kinda the same thing?
Like, I'm just going to google the thing the person is asking for, same as they can.
Should asking for sources be banned too?
Personally, I think not. HN is better, I feel, when people can challenge the assertions of others and ask for the proof, even though that proof is easy enough to find for all parties.
IMO, HN commenters used to at least police themselves more and provide sources in their comments when making claims. It was what used to separate HN and Reddit for me when it came to response quality.
But yes it is rude to just respond "source?" unless they are making some wild batshit claims.
I actually use LLMs to help me dig up the sources. It's quicker than google and you get them nicely formatted besides.
But: Just because it's easy doesn't mean you're allowed to be lazy. You need to check all the sources, not just the ones that happen to agree with your view. Sometimes the ones that disagree are more interesting! And at least you can have a bit of drama yelling at your screen at how dumb they obviously are. Formulating why they are dumb, now there's the challenge - and the intellectual honesty.
But yeah, using LLMs to help with actually doing the research? Totally a thing.
Glad to hear the change of heart here and the guts it took to write it up. I know that's not an easy thing to do, and it likely burned some bridges.
The point about it being gambling, and therefore, taking advantage of idiots, yeah that rings true. The mass proliferation of gambling and the true compulsive addiction and ruin of mostly young men, it's hard to look at oneself and state that they caused that pain for other and their loved ones.
The next step is, of course, to do the very hard part: use the money gained for good. The author mentions that they are a hypocrite for only speaking out after making their money. They need not be so. Finding legitimate ways to use the ill gotten gains for good is a bit of what they built their skills in, after all.
I hope to someday see the next post of theirs detailing how many people they helped and how many lives saved, families reunited and made sound again, based on how they used this new wealth for good.
They are very far from the end of their story, but the midpoint, so to speak, has been passed.
Actually you make a good point here. Women have better reaction times then men, so female drone operators, all else being equal, may be better at the job.
It's not like taking crude, cracking it, then refining the plastics, yadda yadda yadda. It's more an fast automated assembly thing.
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