----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Allen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <LEAPSECS@ROM.USNO.NAVY.MIL> Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2006 7:27 AM Subject: [LEAPSECS] PT Barnum was right
>(gesnippt) > Finally, I've been spending a lot of time in the LA region lately. > The CBS radio affiliate in the SF Bay area broadcasts the hourly > national news spot on, and the time tone is useful for setting a > watch. The CBS radio affiliate in the LA area very plainly is using a > time compressing/FFT pitch shifting device on the live national feed. > The time tone in LA always happens around 10 to 15 seconds after the > hour. You can thank the U.S.' increasingly draconian anti-obscenity laws for that. In response to an email inquiry to KNX on this very subject (the delay I noticed was about nine seconds), I was told that the station delays their broadcast in order to enable on-the-spot editing of objectionable material. The FCC recently increased fines for violation of anti-obscentity rules, and some television stations were even fined for not censoring all 500 milliseconds of the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction", so it's in networks' best interests to do this even if it means setting your watch to their time signal means being 9 seconds late. >> Somebody tell me again -- why is it thta broadcast civil time signals > need atomic accuracy? > I rather like the way James Jesperson and Jane Fitz-Randolph put it in their excellent layperson's introduction to time and frequency, _From Sundials to Atomic Clocks_: "The 'time' as most of us know it is simply inexpensive crumbs from the tables of the few rich "gourmet" consumers of time and frequency information." The guy wearing the trendy Swatch with hands pointing at a blank dial neither knows nor cares about any of the esoterica discussed on this list; for him, the time will be whatever They(tm) say it is. If that's what is meant by "broadcast civil time signals", then it's true: we're being served chronological junk food and most folks couldn't care less. Bon appetit! Brian Garrett