4 ms·

> Universal Time Code (UTC) Uh, Coordinated Universal Time [0]? I can't be the only one who, upon seeing little things like this, immediately has doubts about

> Universal Time Code (UTC) Uh, Coordinated Universal Time [0]? I can't be the only one who, upon seeing little things like this, immediately has doubts about the accuracy of everything else in the article. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time

sho 8y ago
Apropos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
- dingaling 8y ago
  That keeps getting quoted but with no evidence that it exists on a large scale. If I read a $NEWS_SOURCE article and they get something wildly incorrect I don't just proceed to the next article, I close the tab / newspaper.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    I’ve caught myself making that mistake for literally years after learning about it. I am trying to train myself not to continue. I think I’m getting there now.
  - sho 8y ago
    Well, as the wikipedia article states, it is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and yet seems intuitively correct to me. I've certainly recognised the phenomenon in my own behaviour. Instead of as a hard fact to be evidenced and justified, I think a better way of thinking about it might be as a kind of parable - a reminder to keep an open mind and not just blindly accept everything you see in the newspaper, or anywhere else.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > If I read a $NEWS_SOURCE article and they get something wildly incorrect I don't just proceed to the next article, I close the tab / newspaper. Then couple hours or days later you get an article on a different topic from the same $NEWS_SOURCE, and you read it like gospel. What changed over past decades is the way we consume news - it's "unbundled" now; much like we consume movies per-title and not per-channel, we consume news per-story, not per-newspaper. But this didn't improve news quality. Gell-Mann amnesia exists at scale, it's one of the most trivial things to verify - you just need to talk with people. With your family, friends, or with folks on any social media site / on-line bulletin board. You'll see countless of examples of people who suffer from this amnesia, who can't perform the most obvious generalization from observation - to conclude that, since for any topic they know anything about every news article is utter bullshit, and since their friends report the same observations for their domains, the news on the topics they're not experts on must be bullshit too.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Except that if you know anything about how newspapers work, the Gell-Mann theory falls apart. It only works if every article in a newspaper is written by the same person with the same level of knowledge and ignorance of every topic published. This simply isn’t the case, as newspapers are written by dozens or hundreds of different people working for many different companies and with many different backgrounds. For example, a new reporter who bones a story about a local car factory has absolutely no bearing on the accuracy of the work of a seasoned reporter for a wire service covering politics in the nation’s capitol a thousand miles away.
  - danShumway 8y ago
    Well, wait a sec. It does have a bearing on the overall editorial quality of the paper, unless as a reader you can figure out a predictable reason for editorial quality to drop for only one specific topic. It means that a poorly researched article can get out of the door without being flagged. Individual articles of clothing, food, and other products coming out of a company are inspected by different people. But when I go to Wendy's and buy some fries, I don't know which people are inspecting and preparing my food, and know who was preparing my food wouldn't be useful unless I already knew a lot about that person. If I went to a restaurant and my fries had mold on them, it would probably be the fault of a small percentage of the workers there. But I would still be justified in distrusting the rest of my food, even if I thought the rest of the food on my plate was probably prepared by different people. I don't know enough about the individual staff members of my local newspaper or their individual contributions to each article to make an educated distinction between them. If I see evidence that my overall newspaper is willing to publish badly researched articles, it seems very logical to me to conclude, "hey, when you see an article in a subject you're not familiar with, remember that it might be one of the duds. If you see an article by a reporter you're not already familiar with, remember that they were hired by a newspaper that occasionally hires bad reporters."
  - Yetanfou 8y ago
    While this is true, it is often also the case that the people writing about certain areas are not necessarily experts in those areas. I have personal experience with this phenomenon as I used to write for and edit a number of IT-related magazines. In that capacity I went to a lot of press meetings, conferences and other similar gatherings where I mingled with my colleagues from other publications. It was striking to notice how little knowledge many of them actually possessed about the - often deeply technical - subjects being discussed and even more striking to see that they nevertheless wrote articles full of mumbo-jumbo which got published in their outlets which' readers can be assumed to have turned to those with the intent of being informed on those subjects. Being able to write a fluent story is a skill in itself and not necessarily linked to deep knowledge about the subjects the story touches. News publications work off deadlines where it can be - no, strike that, is - most important to have something, anything to publish. Those who can reliably produce the required few paragraphs will rise higher than those who put accuracy above timeliness.
dingaling 8y ago
That and the fact that GPS is not a primary navigation source for commercial aviation. Just shows that being an expert in one domain means that ... you're an expert in one domain.
- t0mas88 8y ago
  It is. For a majority of the fleet RNP1 and RNAV5 use GPS as the primary means of navigation with INS as a backup for a limited amount of time if GPS is unavailable.
  - VBprogrammer 8y ago
    INS is much more than a backup. In the days before GPS it was the primary source of navigation crossing large bodies of water. Of course this meant aircraft coasted in a few miles off of there actual course. It can generally be updated using DME-DME fixes and from VOR fixes, all of which it does automatically. I believe some short haul operators are now specing there aircraft without INS but as far as I know that's an exception rather than the rule.
    - eisa01 8y ago
      Dropping INS is short-sighted, as GPS can be jammed. Russia has been jamming GPS signals in northern Norway during different military exercises [1]. Russia has denied this, but the foreign ministry has started to share the proof of this with them, [2, Norwegian only] [1] https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2019/01/norway-tired-russian-military-gps-jamming-unacceptable-and-risky https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2019/01/norway-ti... [2] https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/K38ee7/ud-har-gitt-russland-gps-bevis?utm_source=vgfront&utm_content=row-1 https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/K38ee7/ud-har-gitt-rus...
xucheng 8y ago
Also GPS does NOT use UTC at all. Ref: http://leapsecond.com/java/gpsclock.htm http://leapsecond.com/java/gpsclock.htm
- piannucci 8y ago
  The GPS broadcast navigation message includes the offset between GPS system time and UTC, which is specified to be an integer number of seconds plus or minus a microsecond. The integers are the running total number of leap seconds since 1980. GPS system time doesn't perform leap seconds, but the clock offsets are calculated so that the system tracks UTC. So I am not certain what you mean.
  - FabHK 8y ago
    I don't understand the downvotes of the poster above correctly highlighting that GPS does not use UTC. GPS does not use UTC, it uses GPS time [1], which is at a constant offset to International Atomic Time, TAI [2], which was in sync back in 1958 with Universal Time [3], on which UTC is based. GPS, TAI, and UTC use SI seconds, while UT1 doesn't (a UT1 second is 1/86400 of a complete rotation of earth). Of course they are all related, but, hey, all time scales are somewhat related and "track each other", given some (time-dependent) offset. Fact is that GPS doesn't run on UTC. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Leap_seconds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Leap... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time
- contingencies 8y ago
  Don't many chips now support all major constellations: GPS (US), GLONASS (Russia), Beidou (China), Galileo (Europe), etc.? I wonder how heavily they test failover...
  - gsich 8y ago
    yes, and they combine them for better results.
ranit 8y ago
Off topic: Does anyone know why Coordinated Universal Time is abbreviated in this order - UTC? None of the languages seems to have that order.
- cs02rm0 8y ago
  The French proposed TUC (temps universel coordonné) and UTC was the "compromise" with CUT.
- rmccue 8y ago
  It's in the Wikipedia page linked here, under Etymology: > The official abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time is UTC. This abbreviation arose from a desire by the International Telecommunication Union and the International Astronomical Union to use the same abbreviation in all languages. English speakers originally proposed CUT (for "coordinated universal time"), while French speakers proposed TUC (for "temps universel coordonné"). The compromise that emerged was UTC, which conforms to the pattern for the abbreviations of the variants of Universal Time (UT0, UT1, UT2, UT1R, etc.). See also the linked citation: https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/nist-time-frequently-asked-questions-faq#cut https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/nist-ti...
  - ranit 8y ago
    Thanks. My bad - didn't read the whole article.

sho 8y ago

Apropos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

dingaling 8y ago
That keeps getting quoted but with no evidence that it exists on a large scale. If I read a $NEWS_SOURCE article and they get something wildly incorrect I don't just proceed to the next article, I close the tab / newspaper.
- ben_w 8y ago
  I’ve caught myself making that mistake for literally years after learning about it. I am trying to train myself not to continue. I think I’m getting there now.
- sho 8y ago
  Well, as the wikipedia article states, it is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and yet seems intuitively correct to me. I've certainly recognised the phenomenon in my own behaviour. Instead of as a hard fact to be evidenced and justified, I think a better way of thinking about it might be as a kind of parable - a reminder to keep an open mind and not just blindly accept everything you see in the newspaper, or anywhere else.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > If I read a $NEWS_SOURCE article and they get something wildly incorrect I don't just proceed to the next article, I close the tab / newspaper. Then couple hours or days later you get an article on a different topic from the same $NEWS_SOURCE, and you read it like gospel. What changed over past decades is the way we consume news - it's "unbundled" now; much like we consume movies per-title and not per-channel, we consume news per-story, not per-newspaper. But this didn't improve news quality. Gell-Mann amnesia exists at scale, it's one of the most trivial things to verify - you just need to talk with people. With your family, friends, or with folks on any social media site / on-line bulletin board. You'll see countless of examples of people who suffer from this amnesia, who can't perform the most obvious generalization from observation - to conclude that, since for any topic they know anything about every news article is utter bullshit, and since their friends report the same observations for their domains, the news on the topics they're not experts on must be bullshit too.
reaperducer 8y ago
Except that if you know anything about how newspapers work, the Gell-Mann theory falls apart. It only works if every article in a newspaper is written by the same person with the same level of knowledge and ignorance of every topic published. This simply isn’t the case, as newspapers are written by dozens or hundreds of different people working for many different companies and with many different backgrounds. For example, a new reporter who bones a story about a local car factory has absolutely no bearing on the accuracy of the work of a seasoned reporter for a wire service covering politics in the nation’s capitol a thousand miles away.
- danShumway 8y ago
  Well, wait a sec. It does have a bearing on the overall editorial quality of the paper, unless as a reader you can figure out a predictable reason for editorial quality to drop for only one specific topic. It means that a poorly researched article can get out of the door without being flagged. Individual articles of clothing, food, and other products coming out of a company are inspected by different people. But when I go to Wendy's and buy some fries, I don't know which people are inspecting and preparing my food, and know who was preparing my food wouldn't be useful unless I already knew a lot about that person. If I went to a restaurant and my fries had mold on them, it would probably be the fault of a small percentage of the workers there. But I would still be justified in distrusting the rest of my food, even if I thought the rest of the food on my plate was probably prepared by different people. I don't know enough about the individual staff members of my local newspaper or their individual contributions to each article to make an educated distinction between them. If I see evidence that my overall newspaper is willing to publish badly researched articles, it seems very logical to me to conclude, "hey, when you see an article in a subject you're not familiar with, remember that it might be one of the duds. If you see an article by a reporter you're not already familiar with, remember that they were hired by a newspaper that occasionally hires bad reporters."
- Yetanfou 8y ago
  While this is true, it is often also the case that the people writing about certain areas are not necessarily experts in those areas. I have personal experience with this phenomenon as I used to write for and edit a number of IT-related magazines. In that capacity I went to a lot of press meetings, conferences and other similar gatherings where I mingled with my colleagues from other publications. It was striking to notice how little knowledge many of them actually possessed about the - often deeply technical - subjects being discussed and even more striking to see that they nevertheless wrote articles full of mumbo-jumbo which got published in their outlets which' readers can be assumed to have turned to those with the intent of being informed on those subjects. Being able to write a fluent story is a skill in itself and not necessarily linked to deep knowledge about the subjects the story touches. News publications work off deadlines where it can be - no, strike that, is - most important to have something, anything to publish. Those who can reliably produce the required few paragraphs will rise higher than those who put accuracy above timeliness.

dingaling 8y ago

That and the fact that GPS is not a primary navigation source for commercial aviation. Just shows that being an expert in one domain means that ... you're an expert in one domain.

t0mas88 8y ago
It is. For a majority of the fleet RNP1 and RNAV5 use GPS as the primary means of navigation with INS as a backup for a limited amount of time if GPS is unavailable.
- VBprogrammer 8y ago
  INS is much more than a backup. In the days before GPS it was the primary source of navigation crossing large bodies of water. Of course this meant aircraft coasted in a few miles off of there actual course. It can generally be updated using DME-DME fixes and from VOR fixes, all of which it does automatically. I believe some short haul operators are now specing there aircraft without INS but as far as I know that's an exception rather than the rule.
  - eisa01 8y ago
    Dropping INS is short-sighted, as GPS can be jammed. Russia has been jamming GPS signals in northern Norway during different military exercises [1]. Russia has denied this, but the foreign ministry has started to share the proof of this with them, [2, Norwegian only] [1] https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2019/01/norway-tired-russian-military-gps-jamming-unacceptable-and-risky https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2019/01/norway-ti... [2] https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/K38ee7/ud-har-gitt-russland-gps-bevis?utm_source=vgfront&utm_content=row-1 https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/K38ee7/ud-har-gitt-rus...

xucheng 8y ago

Also GPS does NOT use UTC at all. Ref: http://leapsecond.com/java/gpsclock.htm http://leapsecond.com/java/gpsclock.htm

piannucci 8y ago
The GPS broadcast navigation message includes the offset between GPS system time and UTC, which is specified to be an integer number of seconds plus or minus a microsecond. The integers are the running total number of leap seconds since 1980. GPS system time doesn't perform leap seconds, but the clock offsets are calculated so that the system tracks UTC. So I am not certain what you mean.
- FabHK 8y ago
  I don't understand the downvotes of the poster above correctly highlighting that GPS does not use UTC. GPS does not use UTC, it uses GPS time [1], which is at a constant offset to International Atomic Time, TAI [2], which was in sync back in 1958 with Universal Time [3], on which UTC is based. GPS, TAI, and UTC use SI seconds, while UT1 doesn't (a UT1 second is 1/86400 of a complete rotation of earth). Of course they are all related, but, hey, all time scales are somewhat related and "track each other", given some (time-dependent) offset. Fact is that GPS doesn't run on UTC. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Leap_seconds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Leap... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Time
contingencies 8y ago
Don't many chips now support all major constellations: GPS (US), GLONASS (Russia), Beidou (China), Galileo (Europe), etc.? I wonder how heavily they test failover...
- gsich 8y ago
  yes, and they combine them for better results.

ranit 8y ago

Off topic: Does anyone know why Coordinated Universal Time is abbreviated in this order - UTC? None of the languages seems to have that order.

cs02rm0 8y ago
The French proposed TUC (temps universel coordonné) and UTC was the "compromise" with CUT.
rmccue 8y ago
It's in the Wikipedia page linked here, under Etymology: > The official abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time is UTC. This abbreviation arose from a desire by the International Telecommunication Union and the International Astronomical Union to use the same abbreviation in all languages. English speakers originally proposed CUT (for "coordinated universal time"), while French speakers proposed TUC (for "temps universel coordonné"). The compromise that emerged was UTC, which conforms to the pattern for the abbreviations of the variants of Universal Time (UT0, UT1, UT2, UT1R, etc.). See also the linked citation: https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/nist-time-frequently-asked-questions-faq#cut https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/nist-ti...
- ranit 8y ago
  Thanks. My bad - didn't read the whole article.