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Cake day: May 29th, 2024

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  • Maybe they could be synced using RF over fiber. This has been proposed as candidate technology for 6g wireless networks, to enable cell free massive MIMO.

    That would mean that you would need to run optical fiber to each of them, though we’ve already seen fiber drones spool out kilometers of the stuff as they fly.

    EDIT: I just remembered this interesting article about doing radio interferometry over a fiber network using cheap quartz oscillators instead of atomic clocks. My (layman’s) understanding is that the quartz oscillators are good enough over a few milliseconds, but will fall out of sync with each other over longer time spans. Meanwhile the fiber optic reference signal (distributed from a central atomic clock) can be kept correct on average by reflecting the reference back down the fiber and doing active correction of the changing path length (caused by thermal fluctuations and vibrations along the fiber) but will be incorrect on a millisecond-to-miliscond basis because of light speed lag and the path length being a moving target. So they use the quartz oscillators over small time scales and use the fiber reference signal to keep them synced over long time scales. Surprisingly the article says they actually get a better sync this way than with using multiple atomic clocks.

    So perhaps something like that is possible.




  • The usage rates in Japanese cities are among the highest in the world, as are the punctuality and reliability of the intercity trains.

    Could the system be less convoluted? Absolutely. But IMO most European countries aren’t in much of a position to criticize given that they aren’t even willing to step up to the plate to anywhere near the same degree, to say nothing of North America.

    Now, one might argue that this has more to do with city form than it does with the quality of the PT infrastructure, but that is infrastructure too, and those two types of infra are two sides of the same coin. And yeah, the city form isn’t completely perfect either, but when it comes to moving a greater proportion of people in the safest and most energy and space efficient way, the numbers are just higher than most other places.



  • There are plenty of nonprofit organizations that have existed for more than 100 years.

    In fact, I would say there’s a better track record for such organizations than there has been for publicly traded capitalist enterprises, which tend to pop in and out of existence like bubbles by comparison. The only ‘for profit’ enterprises with comparable longevity are businesses that have have been owned by the same family for generations.