Just a Second
There will, apparently, be an extra second interposed into the normal countdown to the New Year tonight, supposedly to account for the slowdown in the earth's rotational period due to the languorous embrace of the moon, although this does appear to me to be an suspiciously romantic explanation for what must, when all is said and done, be a simple exercise in accounting.
These interstitial leap seconds are, it would seem, a fairly regular occurrence, and generally occasion little disturbance amongst the public at large, apart from those tasked with deciding what time it is, who understandably regard them as troublesome in the extreme, and have gone so far as to suggest (in all seriousness) that we just accumulate additional seconds until we have enough to make up a whole leap hour, and then unleash them all at once. I myself see this as simple procrastination, since effectively it just allows the current generation of timekeepers to delay having to deal with the problem until they are safely dead, and no longer bear any responsibility for it.
Plus, there is a lot that can happen in a second, and it is a good idea to give people an extra one every now and again, and see what they do with it. Mostly, of course, they will waste it, saying 'well, a second, nothing happens in a second, give me an hour and I will make good use of it, but a second, that is no help at all, it is far too short'. Challenge them on this assertion, however, and ask them to describe their life-changing moments, and you will find that without exception, they all happened in a second. Even my own experience, corralled and constrained though it has been by my obsessive desire to analyse and to plan, tells me that when things happen, they happen in an instant.
For example, I was sitting at my desk, in my little student room in King's, early in the morning, when I suddenly realised that correcting for the motion of my Deep-Tow receiver was in fact just a special case of diffraction-stack migration, and could thus be dealt with using the wealth of approaches and techniques devised to handle that very problem. I remember exactly the moment that occurred to me, and it was, literally, a moment. Antecedent to this point I had been glumly trying to work out how to parameterise the complex time-varying geometries involved into something encodable, and more importantly, something that could be presented in my thesis without making me look like an idiot, the next minute I not only had a solution, but a solution so dazzling in its simplicity, and breathtaking in its implications, that it probably merited a whole chapter just on its own.
I also remember the instant when it occurred to me, after having laboriously constructed a mechanism whereby user interfaces could be described in text files, and instantiated on demand, that there was no reason why I shouldn't describe all of the rest of my software like this as well, and produce purely declarative programs. This may not seem like such a big deal now, what with XUL and XAML, but at the time, fifteen years ago, it was a conceptual leap. And it happened as I was sitting in the Green Dragon, in Lovedean, on a Tuesday evening, on my way home from work. In an instant, my understanding of software changed, and that sudden realisation altered my approach to it completely.
There are of course the less happy moments, which in retrospect become the boundaries between the before and the after in our lives. When the doctor asks you to come back in to discuss the results of your tests, or your girlfriend says 'we need to talk', or the phone rings late at night. All of them, however, are characterised by the fact that they occur in the endless, infinite space of a second, and nothing is ever the same afterwards as it was before. So be watchful, and wary, tonight.
These interstitial leap seconds are, it would seem, a fairly regular occurrence, and generally occasion little disturbance amongst the public at large, apart from those tasked with deciding what time it is, who understandably regard them as troublesome in the extreme, and have gone so far as to suggest (in all seriousness) that we just accumulate additional seconds until we have enough to make up a whole leap hour, and then unleash them all at once. I myself see this as simple procrastination, since effectively it just allows the current generation of timekeepers to delay having to deal with the problem until they are safely dead, and no longer bear any responsibility for it.
Plus, there is a lot that can happen in a second, and it is a good idea to give people an extra one every now and again, and see what they do with it. Mostly, of course, they will waste it, saying 'well, a second, nothing happens in a second, give me an hour and I will make good use of it, but a second, that is no help at all, it is far too short'. Challenge them on this assertion, however, and ask them to describe their life-changing moments, and you will find that without exception, they all happened in a second. Even my own experience, corralled and constrained though it has been by my obsessive desire to analyse and to plan, tells me that when things happen, they happen in an instant.
For example, I was sitting at my desk, in my little student room in King's, early in the morning, when I suddenly realised that correcting for the motion of my Deep-Tow receiver was in fact just a special case of diffraction-stack migration, and could thus be dealt with using the wealth of approaches and techniques devised to handle that very problem. I remember exactly the moment that occurred to me, and it was, literally, a moment. Antecedent to this point I had been glumly trying to work out how to parameterise the complex time-varying geometries involved into something encodable, and more importantly, something that could be presented in my thesis without making me look like an idiot, the next minute I not only had a solution, but a solution so dazzling in its simplicity, and breathtaking in its implications, that it probably merited a whole chapter just on its own.
I also remember the instant when it occurred to me, after having laboriously constructed a mechanism whereby user interfaces could be described in text files, and instantiated on demand, that there was no reason why I shouldn't describe all of the rest of my software like this as well, and produce purely declarative programs. This may not seem like such a big deal now, what with XUL and XAML, but at the time, fifteen years ago, it was a conceptual leap. And it happened as I was sitting in the Green Dragon, in Lovedean, on a Tuesday evening, on my way home from work. In an instant, my understanding of software changed, and that sudden realisation altered my approach to it completely.
There are of course the less happy moments, which in retrospect become the boundaries between the before and the after in our lives. When the doctor asks you to come back in to discuss the results of your tests, or your girlfriend says 'we need to talk', or the phone rings late at night. All of them, however, are characterised by the fact that they occur in the endless, infinite space of a second, and nothing is ever the same afterwards as it was before. So be watchful, and wary, tonight.