£18,000 clock loses 60 minutes in a day

An £18,000 clock designed to be accurate to within a few millionths of a second lost an hour in one day.

The Millennium Clock outside Canada's National Research Council in Ottawa is linked to the caesium clock which keeps official time for the nation.

But officials are mystified as to how it lost a whole hour last Sunday. It should lose no more than a split second each year.

Spokeswoman Natalie Gour told Ananova there had been a problem with the software. The correct time was being kept, she said, but it was being displayed wrongly.

She said the unexplained glitch had now been ironed out.

Last updated: 19:28 Monday 30th April 2001

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_277934.html?menu=news.quirkies

-- Doris (nocents@bellsouth.net), May 01, 2001

Answers

Response to £18,000 clock loses 60 minutes in a day

Fairly embarrassing, Doris, when atomic clocks can't display time!

Monday April 30 6:35 AM ET

Super-Accurate Atomic Clock Hates Sundays

OTTAWA (Reuters) - A C$40,000 Canadian clock display designed to be accurate to within a few millionths of a second a year has lost an hour every Sunday this month, embarrassed officials admitted on Friday.

They said a software bug had affected the large electronic Millennium Clock outside Ottawa's National Research Council (NRC), which is directly linked to a C$1 million cesium clock responsible for maintaining official Canadian time.

``The clock itself is not losing time. The problem is a display, which doesn't display time properly,'' said a fed-up Jean-Simon Boulanger, the NRC's group leader of frequency and time.

``Why their software makes it go back an hour on Sundays I have no idea. We're providing the right time to the software but the software is providing something else to the display,'' he told Reuters. ``It's embarrassing.''

NRC officials have had to reset the clock every Monday morning this month.

Boulanger said the display had not taken into account the fact that clocks went forward on April 1 to mark the introduction of Daylight Saving Time.

Just to add to the humiliation, the display sports a plaque boasting that the Millennium Clock ``celebrates Canada's rich history of leadership in timekeeping''.

Boulanger said the display had been plagued by problems since it was installed in June 1999 to celebrate the turn of the century.

``It was meant to be there only for passage of the year 2000 but someone said 'Why not keep it to the year 2001?' It's supposed to be taken away any time now,'' he said with more than a hint of relief.

Source: htt p://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010430/od/clock_dc_1.html

-- Lee Maloney (leemaloney@hotmail.com), May 02, 2001.

Response to £18,000 clock loses 60 minutes in a day

Hi Lee

Nice to see you are still around.

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), May 02, 2001.