You Depend on Time, This Is How It Works and You Won’t...
summary
History of calendars to atomic clocks with concrete numbers and systems: the day is 23h56m4s sidereal, Gregorian skipped Oct 4→15 and Sweden once had Feb 30 (1712), mechanical escapements give way to quartz ovens then atomic clocks using cesium transitions at around 9.2 GHz and newer optical strontium clocks that measure gravity differences. Computers read time via rdtsc timestamp counter, kernel-exposed vdso user-space clock, and synchronize over networks with White Rabbit PTP over SyncE or GPS; Google’s 2008 0.1% smear and leap‑second handling are practical fixes.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction to time
- 1:22Calendars and history
- 6:23Months and lunisolar cycles
- 7:51Days and weeks
- 10:14Evolution of clock technology
- 17:56Time synchronization methods
- 22:09Computers and time measurement
- 25:48Software APIs and leap seconds
- 29:17Network synchronization
