Atomic clocks work using the energy transitions between different electron orbitals. Nuclear clocks work by using energy transitions within the nucleus itself - the difference between the lowest energy arrangement of the protons+neutrons and excited states (isomers).

Normally you need a serious punch to get a nucleus into an excited state: x-rays, gamma rays, or bombardment with energic particles. It so happens that thorium-229 requires the lowest energy to get to an excited state, and that can be achieved with deep-UV (148 nm) light. Laser light at that wavelength has only recently become possible. Also: Th-229 does not really exist in nature, you have to extract it from the decay of U-235, which itself has low natural abundance.

So it's pretty cool stuff, and this first demonstration hints at what could be possible in the future. Atomic clocks use light in the microwave range; this nuclear clock uses light in a frequency band five orders or magnitude higher, and so could theoretically have that much greater precision. And because the fundamental phenomenon occurs in the nucleus rather than the electron cloud, it's much less susceptible to external interference.

My original submission included a number of not-paywalled links.

Thanks, BeauHD, for swooping in, scooping my submission from two days ago, and posting a worse summary.

I'll say! They buried it at the South Pole!

If you are interested in staggering some more: go check out how much power is channeled via the Gulf Stream, both in terms of heat transport and in shear kinetic energy. It's tens-to-hundreds of terawatts.

(It's tough to tease the Gulf Stream on its own from the larger AMOC, which is on the order of one petawatt.)

If only we hadn't forced Trump to call off dismantling that ocean monitoring network, none of this would have happened! I mean, if you don't bother to measure it, does it really happen?

Out in the alternate universe where folks are actually building things (instead of the corner office of the guy using business double speak) "success" also means "attracts competent developers and retains them."

Many folks at the time did not want to contribute code that would just get stolen by proprietary parasites and *literally* sold back to them.

Or to projects where improvements never made it back to the mainline.

Those folks, in my experience, were the ones who actually both knew what they were doing and had a strong belief that they were contributing something to the larger community - and not something easily looted by the guy using business speak who just wanted more revenue.

Those folks, whether or not you agree with me, preferred contributing their time to GPL'd projects over BSD projects.

Were you a developer at the time? If not. STFU. Stay in your lane.

It's worth noting that busybox replicates many of them, and it has its own oddities.

Literally every one of the coreutils tools have some odd edge cases - some that make sense, some that do not. But at some point that behavior is something that callers expect, and when a replacement does not behave that way... You know the rest. "#define bad" etc.

I'm holding out until they can use their model to locate whales on the moon.

CGPGrey summed it up nicely:

"The nature of a keyhole is to be cracked, and the nature of the Internet is to bring demons to the door. No matter how much we might wish it, there is no way to build a digital lock that only angels can open and demons cannot. Anyone saying otherwise is either ignorant of the mathematics, or less of an angel than they appear."

Yeah, well, I was considering a turkey sandwich for lunch. What of it? Is anything actually going to change? Game Theory suggest no.

Well, the climate-denying mouthbreathers in power wasted a few decades claiming that it didn't exist. Now they're claiming that 1) it's too expensive to do anything about it (as though not doing anything is costless), or 2) anything we do now won't matter because Look Over There!

So, yeah, it could have been an easy, orderly, and gradual transition, stretching over generations. We could have avoiding both the drastic economic upheavals and the worst effects on the climate. But we wasted 30-40 years with our collective head in the sand, and now shit's gettin' real, so both drastic measures and effects are piling up. Is it any wonder? It's like bitching about having to pull an all-nighter for a college essay, even though it was assigned weeks ago.

Really tough to get pictures of a monitor without Moire effects making it obvious what you've done.