Happy New Year!

Happy 2009, Everyone!  We brought in the new year with coverage of Times Square by NBC.  After having mentioned in a previous post how we would have a leap second this year, NBC in fact brought it up, and then didn’t show the clock going to 23:59:60.  Booo!!!

I wish you and yours a much happier and a healthy 2009!  Many changes are coming to all of our lives.  There will be a new administration in the White House, and with it new priorities, and perhaps a new discussion about how we can all make our lives better.

Maybe we will also see new inventions, and the rise of new artists.  We will see the new Harry Potter movie, with any luck.  And we’ll see new places.  Although who knows where, just yet.

Another Book Review: Alan Alda’s Latest

Alan Alda’s latest book, Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself, generally isn’t very funny. But it is good.  Alda, a father and a grandfather, talks about his nearly fruitless search for meaning in life.  He talks about making a difference, but also how each of us is responsible for finding meaning meaning in our own lives.  Alda, as it appears, is a bit of a nerd, and he certainly does have some funny stories to tell, like the time he blew a hole through his ceiling as a kid when he had a loaded weapon.  Sure, it’s funny now!  Nobody died or was hurt, and somehow that brought Alda more to the consumate performer we have enjoyed for decades.

Bamford’s latest update on the NSA

James Bamford is well known for his revealing of the National Security Agency in The Puzzle Palace, published in 1983.  He has written two updates since then, Body of Secrets and The Shadow Factory, the latest one covering the Bush Administration in some detail.  Bamford’s technical details in The Shadow Factory are nowhere near as good as they were in The Puzzle Palace, which is something that really attracted me to his writing.  Also, in this book, Bamford seems to play both sides of the fence, at one point arguing that the attacks on 9/11 were an intelligence failure, while at the same time arguing that we must safeguard our civil liberties.  This works, mostly because he successfully argues (in my opinion) that the government had all the power it needed to stop the attacks, but that incompetence ruled the day.

To be sure there are a few points I would take issue with.  For one, although I despise the name, it was probably a good idea to roll together many agencies into the Department of Homeland Security.  But quite frankly even that was done ineptly, as we have seen from auditor reports, again and again.

Returning to the Shadow Factory, in this update Bamford highlights the role of the Internet and the change in the nature of communications, where many communications have moved from sattelite to fiber, and from simple voice circuits to voice over IP.  He talks about certain organizations wanting to hire Cisco employees simply to reverse engineer IOS and find ways to install back doors.  I have no way of knowing if that has happened.

Bamford retreads much of the story about the illegal spying the NSA did within the United States, and how James Comey would not recertify the program.  While it makes my blood boil to think that anyone in government would think that such a program was legal (certified by the attorney general or not), that part of the story isn’t so much about the NSA as it is about Dick Cheney and David Attington.  Quite frankly I think Bob Woordward has covered that ground as well as could be covered.

Were I to give advice to Mr. Bamford it would be simply this: it is difficult to read just one of the three books he’s written, as either the earliest is woefully out of date, or the latest doesn’t stand on its own without having read the earliest.  A consolidated update that combines all three seems in order.

By Request: A brief description of the leap second

Every day of every year nominally lasts 24 hours, or 1,440 minutes, or 86,400 seconds.  This December 31st, as happens on irregular occasions, will actually last 86,401 seconds.  You are of course familiar with leap days, which occur on leap years, which occur every four years, except on century boundaries unless the century boundary happens to be divisible by 400 (as was the case in 2000).

Leap seconds are not so easy to predict.  They are based on irregularities in the Earth’s rotation, as measured by the International Earth Rotation Service, and can happen on either June 30 or December 31.  When it happens, there is an official time that is December 31, 23:59:60.  UTC is adjusted accordingly, which is what just about all local time is derived from.

As it turns out, we haven’t seen leap second in a while, and here is why:

This information shows deviation from 86,400 seconds in terms of the average time it took for Earth to rotate once for each day of the year.  Since 1997, the world has actually slowed down, although there’s been a slight pickup in pace over the last two years.

How do we know that the Earth slowed down?  You might think that the definition of time is based on the Earth’s rotation and its orbit around the sun, but in fact that definition is somewhere between disputed and obsolete. The actual definition is as follows:

the duration of  9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.

If we now take that really large number of periods, using a Cesium clock, we can mulitply it by the number of seconds in a day and compare against where we think the Earth should be.  If it hasn’t quite gotten all the way around, then we note the difference, and add that to a cummulative difference.  Eventually it is necessary to hold up clocks by a second to let the Earth catch up.