[TILWISHBW] Leap Seconds

(Just to load up the site a bit and get it going, I'm going to contribute with a little more frequency then when I level off and find a sustainable pace.)

You've probably heard of Leap Years, a convention based on the fact that our Earth doesn't behave nicely with respect to nice round numbers (it takes a little under 365 and 1/4 days to get back to where we started going around the sun), or our strange way of doing it (add an extra day to February every 4 years, except every 100 years where we skip over the leap year and don't add the extra day, or every 400 years where we skip over skipping over the leap year and add the friggin day back as in the first place), but our time system is a bit more screwy than that.

We actually have an extra second that we end up adding about every 18 months to the last second of the month, GMT (although it only tends to happen at the end of June or the end of December), or right before 8 PM Eastern time. The jist of it is that because of the moon's orbit around the earth, and some action relating to tidal acceleration and a gradual loss of spin motion (angular momentum), the earth is very minutely slowing down its spin. As a result, each day is just the slightest bit longer than the last, until about every 18 months when the amount adds up to a whole second longer (cumulatively), and we do a leap-second to resync our totally accurate atomic clocks from their perfect measurement of the defined "second" to rematch the reality of what exact time it is in the time of day with regard to the Sun.

(Check the Wikipedia entry on this for where I got most of the hard information from. I saw some discussion about how to account for leap-seconds in the linux kernel mailing list a long long time ago too...)

-G

[TILWISHBW] American Airlines Frequent Flier Mileage

It looks pretty clear that the following is true:

1 freq. flier mile = $0.022 USD

at least for American Airlines. This was based on a sidenote they happened to drop at the bottom of a mass mailing they recently sent out regarding donations:

Donations are tax deductible less $.022 per mile earned.
"AAdvantage Miles and the National Park Foundation", email, 6/25/2004

(American Airlines calls their frequent flier miles AAdvantage Miles)

They're asking for a donation which is fully tax deductible by the government, and they're giving you back a few miles for being so swell and contributing to the fund they picked, the National Park Foundation in this case. However, any compensation they give you isn't deductible by you, so you have to back that part out before you mention what you "gave" to the government. So they had to value their frequent flier miles, and there's the answer from them.

-G

Whiffing precedes the creation of Whiffing-blog

Wow, this was a funny turn of events.

In the only-reality-can-be-less-believable vein of stories, I managed to whiff right off the bat with this blog. First, I'd like to tip my hat to Bryan, as he created the whiff-blog that we had discussed making jointly a while ago, which you can peruse over at whiff.blogspot.com, which managed to slip my mind.

This falls under a particular pattern for a whiff, the rediscovering-your-own-earlier-thought-as-clever manuever. Not as clumsy as the take-the-extra-step-up-a-staircase style, nor likely to cause as much damage to an outsider as the continue-pushing-something-until-it-gives-and-jumps-much-farther-than-expected style. No, this mode generally takes the following form:

1. Hit on something (that some may consider) clever.
2. Forget about said hitting on.
3. Under similar circumstances that caused you to discover it in the first place, "hit on" the idea again, and take some other action.

In and of itself, this isn't really an observable whiff, as from your point of view, you're the same clever bloke that hit on the thing in the first place. Where it tends to get less pretty is when you happen to espouse the "new" idea around someone that was party to the "old" idea, and chooses to inform you of it. But then, what are friends for ;)

Well, in the ongoing, we're going to keep them both (and some of their obtuse permutations) alive and going, and do a hefty bit of cross-contributing. I suppose I couldn't really have asked for more than the first article in the whiffing blog to be a self-fulfilling whiff.

-G

TILWISHBW

TILWISHBW (acr) (an Acronym): 1. An acronym for Things I Learned While I Should Have Been Working.

I know, I know. You're at work, you're supposed to work. I know that this makes sense on some level, but the day to day of it has always managed to elude me. I have a few (and their numbers are dying) friends who actually can do this - get in to work at 9, do what they're supposed to do until 12, take a 30 minute lunch, and then get back to the office and work until 5.

I sometimes wonder if I'm broken because I simply can't do this seemingly simple thing.

At any rate, given the earlier understanding of the complete impossibility of doing 7.5 hours of work per day (6.75 if you're a smoker), I have made it a fervent goal to help the spreading movement of nonproductivity by providing a forum for collected research on what to do instead. I'll make some periodic notes here under the heading of TILWISHBW, knowing that from the perspective of work, this is a definite foray into the field of whiffing.

-G

Yeah! Getting the Whiffing under way...

Hello!

Just by means of getting things under way, my real name is Guy, and I spend a lot of time whiffing. I'd like two head two things off immediately:

1. What is a whiff?

The definition of a whiff:

whiff (n) (from the Latin whiffus, or the sound a bat makes as it hurtles quickly past a ball that is missed): 1. A screwup ("you shoulda seen this whiff the other day"). 2. (v) To commit an act that generally doesn't go the way you may initially intend ("I went to place the water jug on the water cooler, but I whiffed and it spilled all over").

2. Shouldn't the acronym for Abstract Theories in Whiffing be "ATW"?

Please reread the answer to question number 1.


At any rate, it's my goal to provide a place to discuss whiffing (both personal, observed, and the general run of the mill life stuff), as well as to discuss a modern application of whiffing, or Things Learned While I Should Have Been Working.

Enjoy ;)

-G