5 ms·

There's Barycentric Dynamical Time, which takes time dilation into account: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Dynamical_Time https://en.m.wikipedia.or

by wh313 6y ago

There's Barycentric Dynamical Time, which takes time dilation into account: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Dynamical_Time https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barycentric_Dynamical_Time NASA has actually thought through this problem and created SPICE, which lets you convert between different time systems, some relativistic and some not, as well as doing conversions between various reference frames: https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/index.html https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/index.html

dr_orpheus 6y ago
SPICE is pretty awesome. I wish that more people in the aerospace industry were aware of, including people AT NASA. I work at a company contracting on NASA projects and a couple weeks ago I had to correct their code because they weren't accounting for the leap second offset between UTC and GPS correctly. When I asked why he wrote his own function instead of using SPICE he responded "what's SPICE?". Literally people in the same building as him maintain the SPICE toolkits.
- sushicalculus 6y ago
  Need to bring back some of those brownbag lunch & learn events, starting with "SPICE up your clocks"! Except people might not be comfortable sitting in the same room these days
  - azinman2 6y ago
    No reason you can’t have virtual tech talks
  - 0xffff2 6y ago
    Comfort won't be much of a factor since most NASA centers are completely work from home for non-mission-critical work for the indefinite future. Nonetheless, we do have a ton of these kinds of things going on all the time. The bigger problem is that NASA's culture is so meeting heavy that it's hard to justify these kinds of low importance events on my calendar.
    - whoisthemachine 6y ago
      > The bigger problem is that NASA's culture is so meeting heavy that it's hard to justify these kinds of low importance events on my calendar. Not sure if you are speaking from experience, but if that is the case, and this is true, then NASA as an organization seems to be a poor judge of what's important.
      - 0xffff2 6y ago
        Yes, from experience. It's not that we don't know what's important, it's that it's all important and I have to find time to actually write code every now and then too. The real problem is just that we're all very busy and it's not really possible for everyone in the agency to have even a cursory awareness of everything that's going on. Even now with everything being virtual, I get invites to brown-bag type events probably 3-4 time per week. I can go to one or two, but there's no way I can fit every single one into my schedule.
        whoisthemachine 6y ago
        Interesting. Do you think there's a chance for more balance or does it seem just a natural result of the demands of the job?
        0xffff2 6y ago
        There are a couple of issues at play. One is that there's so much interesting stuff going on that I (and most of my colleagues) tend to volunteer ourselves for lots of projects, which results in us going "deep" on a couple of projects at the expense of not having enough time to go "wide" by attending lots of talks that aren't directly related to our own work. That part's on me and I really could make more time in my schedule if I just said "no" more often (but again, I don't say "yes" because I'm pressured to do so, I say "yes" because the work is really fun and interesting!). The other question is why we have so many meetings per project. That one's tougher to tackle and I don't really have an answer. The one thing that I have identified is that we're very in to making sure that everyone has their say on things before taking action. That's a good thing overall, but it also leads to tremendous meeting bloat. A meeting that would only take 5 minutes if everyone restricted themselves to discussing critical issues before making a decision regularly takes a full hour in which we examine every pitfall, no matter how minor.
qz2 6y ago
I have enough problems dealing with time on this planet. This is going to break a lot of software and software developers instantly :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- peterburkimsher 6y ago
  https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program... I'm very thankful for the creators of https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ handling time zone weirdness, etc, so that I can still get to Zoom calls on time (usually). I don't know how the Moment developers can ever think it's "done" - "We now generally consider Moment to be a legacy project in maintenance mode. It is not dead, but it is indeed done."

by wh313 6y ago

dr_orpheus 6y ago

SPICE is pretty awesome. I wish that more people in the aerospace industry were aware of, including people AT NASA. I work at a company contracting on NASA projects and a couple weeks ago I had to correct their code because they weren't accounting for the leap second offset between UTC and GPS correctly. When I asked why he wrote his own function instead of using SPICE he responded "what's SPICE?". Literally people in the same building as him maintain the SPICE toolkits.

sushicalculus 6y ago
Need to bring back some of those brownbag lunch & learn events, starting with "SPICE up your clocks"! Except people might not be comfortable sitting in the same room these days
- azinman2 6y ago
  No reason you can’t have virtual tech talks
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  Comfort won't be much of a factor since most NASA centers are completely work from home for non-mission-critical work for the indefinite future. Nonetheless, we do have a ton of these kinds of things going on all the time. The bigger problem is that NASA's culture is so meeting heavy that it's hard to justify these kinds of low importance events on my calendar.
  - whoisthemachine 6y ago
    > The bigger problem is that NASA's culture is so meeting heavy that it's hard to justify these kinds of low importance events on my calendar. Not sure if you are speaking from experience, but if that is the case, and this is true, then NASA as an organization seems to be a poor judge of what's important.
    - 0xffff2 6y ago
      Yes, from experience. It's not that we don't know what's important, it's that it's all important and I have to find time to actually write code every now and then too. The real problem is just that we're all very busy and it's not really possible for everyone in the agency to have even a cursory awareness of everything that's going on. Even now with everything being virtual, I get invites to brown-bag type events probably 3-4 time per week. I can go to one or two, but there's no way I can fit every single one into my schedule.
      - whoisthemachine 6y ago
        Interesting. Do you think there's a chance for more balance or does it seem just a natural result of the demands of the job?
        0xffff2 6y ago
        There are a couple of issues at play. One is that there's so much interesting stuff going on that I (and most of my colleagues) tend to volunteer ourselves for lots of projects, which results in us going "deep" on a couple of projects at the expense of not having enough time to go "wide" by attending lots of talks that aren't directly related to our own work. That part's on me and I really could make more time in my schedule if I just said "no" more often (but again, I don't say "yes" because I'm pressured to do so, I say "yes" because the work is really fun and interesting!). The other question is why we have so many meetings per project. That one's tougher to tackle and I don't really have an answer. The one thing that I have identified is that we're very in to making sure that everyone has their say on things before taking action. That's a good thing overall, but it also leads to tremendous meeting bloat. A meeting that would only take 5 minutes if everyone restricted themselves to discussing critical issues before making a decision regularly takes a full hour in which we examine every pitfall, no matter how minor.

qz2 6y ago

I have enough problems dealing with time on this planet. This is going to break a lot of software and software developers instantly :)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
peterburkimsher 6y ago
https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program... I'm very thankful for the creators of https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ handling time zone weirdness, etc, so that I can still get to Zoom calls on time (usually). I don't know how the Moment developers can ever think it's "done" - "We now generally consider Moment to be a legacy project in maintenance mode. It is not dead, but it is indeed done."