Right now, the official U. S. Time is:
November 29, 2019 12:50 PM Subscribe
time.gov (About this Service)
The U.S. time is provided by NIST and USNO.
Previously, but that was sixteen years ago and before the widget was converted to HTML5.
The U.S. time is provided by NIST and USNO.
Previously, but that was sixteen years ago and before the widget was converted to HTML5.
Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?
posted by PhineasGage at 1:14 PM on November 29, 2019 [7 favorites]
posted by PhineasGage at 1:14 PM on November 29, 2019 [7 favorites]
Do You Know What Time It Would Be If We Were On Mars
posted by cortex at 1:29 PM on November 29, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by cortex at 1:29 PM on November 29, 2019 [1 favorite]
I was very happy to see my computer clock advanced one minute the exact moment the official clock did.
posted by slogger at 1:31 PM on November 29, 2019 [7 favorites]
posted by slogger at 1:31 PM on November 29, 2019 [7 favorites]
Once upon a time we could call POPCORN for this kind of thing.
posted by one for the books at 1:35 PM on November 29, 2019 [6 favorites]
posted by one for the books at 1:35 PM on November 29, 2019 [6 favorites]
In Maine, we can call 775-4321 for Time & (Portland) Temp. I and a number of others use this number for various stores' affinity programs.
posted by theora55 at 1:39 PM on November 29, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by theora55 at 1:39 PM on November 29, 2019 [3 favorites]
nist.gov is one of the few sites that will display the time correctly during a leap second, showing 15:59:60 on the clock display.
In addition to the cute retro web clock NIST also runs a bunch of NTP servers. You're probably better off just using whatever is built in to your OS or the NTP pool, but it's nice that our government's official time body also runs time servers for free.
posted by Nelson at 1:43 PM on November 29, 2019 [12 favorites]
In addition to the cute retro web clock NIST also runs a bunch of NTP servers. You're probably better off just using whatever is built in to your OS or the NTP pool, but it's nice that our government's official time body also runs time servers for free.
posted by Nelson at 1:43 PM on November 29, 2019 [12 favorites]
Some of the few non-Voice of America shortwave radio broadcasts that the US still funds are time signals, WWV (Colorado) and WWVH (Hawaii). It's pretty much identical to what you'd hear calling a phone number to get the time ("at the tone, the time will be...") except it reports UTC rather than local time and it also ticks off the seconds.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:47 PM on November 29, 2019 [5 favorites]
posted by tobascodagama at 1:47 PM on November 29, 2019 [5 favorites]
What's the area code of the phone number you can call to get the time? I remember the number is MEridian 7-2323, but the last time I called it, I didn't need to enter an area code.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 2:16 PM on November 29, 2019
posted by Kirth Gerson at 2:16 PM on November 29, 2019
7576229311
posted by FirstMateKate at 2:17 PM on November 29, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by FirstMateKate at 2:17 PM on November 29, 2019 [2 favorites]
Right now, the official U. S. Time is:
LATER THAN YOU THINK
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:26 PM on November 29, 2019 [11 favorites]
LATER THAN YOU THINK
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:26 PM on November 29, 2019 [11 favorites]
Do You Know What Time It Would Be If We Were On Mars
At the start of Mars missions, it's common for the operations team to go on Mars time. A Martian sol is longer than an Earth day, so you drift away from local time, about 40 minutes a day, sort of resyncing with Earth every 36 days or so. It's been described as perpetual jet lag.
posted by zamboni at 2:27 PM on November 29, 2019 [3 favorites]
At the start of Mars missions, it's common for the operations team to go on Mars time. A Martian sol is longer than an Earth day, so you drift away from local time, about 40 minutes a day, sort of resyncing with Earth every 36 days or so. It's been described as perpetual jet lag.
posted by zamboni at 2:27 PM on November 29, 2019 [3 favorites]
I feel like it needs...a dancing Joe Jackson animated gif in the background.
Will also accept Anthrax.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:27 PM on November 29, 2019 [1 favorite]
Will also accept Anthrax.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:27 PM on November 29, 2019 [1 favorite]
This site is so beautiful. It is clearly something built in the early nineties that has been running unmodified since then, because it has needed no improvement.
posted by egypturnash at 2:40 PM on November 29, 2019 [9 favorites]
posted by egypturnash at 2:40 PM on November 29, 2019 [9 favorites]
tobascodagama: “Some of the few non-Voice of America shortwave radio broadcasts that the US still funds are time signals, WWV (Colorado) and WWVH (Hawaii).”For now.
posted by ob1quixote at 4:03 PM on November 29, 2019 [3 favorites]
I'll just mention quickly Flavor Flav, who knows about time, and also Morris Day And The, who WERE The Time.
posted by hippybear at 4:40 PM on November 29, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 4:40 PM on November 29, 2019 [3 favorites]
I just called 414-844-1414 to see if I could still get the time in Milwaukee. One can. But now there's an ad with a call to action before the time announcement. The voice is different. There's a weather summary and forecast. ::sigh::
As a child in the 1970s, I'd call this number to set my red-leather banded Mickey Mouse watch after winding it up, and heard the dulcet tones of Jane Barbe: "Good evening. The Wisconsin Telephone Company brings you the correct time. EIGHT. FIFTY-TWO. And ten seconds. BEEP! Good evening. The Wisconsin Telephone Company brings you the correct time. EIGHT. FIFTY-TWO. And twenty seconds. BEEP!" Back in the day, one call would allow you to hear a loop of 6 time announcements in 10-second intervals, and then it hung up.
posted by droplet at 5:01 PM on November 29, 2019 [3 favorites]
As a child in the 1970s, I'd call this number to set my red-leather banded Mickey Mouse watch after winding it up, and heard the dulcet tones of Jane Barbe: "Good evening. The Wisconsin Telephone Company brings you the correct time. EIGHT. FIFTY-TWO. And ten seconds. BEEP! Good evening. The Wisconsin Telephone Company brings you the correct time. EIGHT. FIFTY-TWO. And twenty seconds. BEEP!" Back in the day, one call would allow you to hear a loop of 6 time announcements in 10-second intervals, and then it hung up.
posted by droplet at 5:01 PM on November 29, 2019 [3 favorites]
I grew up setting my watch to those WWV stations on my father's radio. I ended up being the one managing our NTP infrastructure. Go figure.
posted by zengargoyle at 5:10 PM on November 29, 2019 [7 favorites]
posted by zengargoyle at 5:10 PM on November 29, 2019 [7 favorites]
I'll just mention quickly Flavor Flav, who knows about time, and also Morris Day And The, who WERE The Time.
It's a club that's...cultural.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:50 PM on November 29, 2019
It's a club that's...cultural.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:50 PM on November 29, 2019
Ah but zengargoyle do you set your NTP clocks to those WWV stations? They still provide a very reliable oscillator. One nice thing is the signal penetrates datacenter walls, unlike the GPS signal most modern stratum 0 clocks use.
You can listen to a WWV simulator if you don't have a shortwave receiver handy. Or build your own simulator with a Raspberry Pi. I went looking for someone who'd stuck a WWV receiver onto an RPi for accurate time but all I could find were GPS projects.
posted by Nelson at 5:51 PM on November 29, 2019 [4 favorites]
You can listen to a WWV simulator if you don't have a shortwave receiver handy. Or build your own simulator with a Raspberry Pi. I went looking for someone who'd stuck a WWV receiver onto an RPi for accurate time but all I could find were GPS projects.
posted by Nelson at 5:51 PM on November 29, 2019 [4 favorites]
Once upon a time, I had the USNO Time Service phone number saved. Every now and then when i was bored at work (evening shift at a parking lot after all the commuters had left), I'd call in and just listen to the recording. The voice was hypnotic.
posted by Fukiyama at 7:45 PM on November 29, 2019
posted by Fukiyama at 7:45 PM on November 29, 2019
One of the first calls I ever made with a modem was to NIST's then new (ish) modem time service. I forget exactly what strange protocol it used to communicate the start of second, but I do remember how overwrought the concerns over the marker maybe being delayed by as much as 300ms (!) if you didn't make sure compression and error correction were off on your modem seemed to me at the time.
I'm pretty sure they shut it down sometime in the last decade, but there was good reason for once. Unlike the radio service, the modem service wasn't really useful as a frequency standard.
posted by wierdo at 8:34 PM on November 29, 2019
I'm pretty sure they shut it down sometime in the last decade, but there was good reason for once. Unlike the radio service, the modem service wasn't really useful as a frequency standard.
posted by wierdo at 8:34 PM on November 29, 2019
For those fans of time.gov who are also webmasters, I highly recommend embedding their widget to conveniently show your visitors the current official U.S. time.
You may also want to embed it into your Electron apps.
posted by hexaflexagon at 12:53 AM on November 30, 2019
You may also want to embed it into your Electron apps.
posted by hexaflexagon at 12:53 AM on November 30, 2019
Interesting. The clock on my Windows 10 lappy was off about 90 seconds. Resyncing with Microsoft's time server fixed it, but who knows how long that will last.
Ahhhh... Just managed to change the time server to nist. Nice.
posted by kathrynm at 4:55 AM on November 30, 2019
Ahhhh... Just managed to change the time server to nist. Nice.
posted by kathrynm at 4:55 AM on November 30, 2019
In time it could have been so much more, but time is precious I know.
posted by Meatbomb at 8:08 AM on November 30, 2019
posted by Meatbomb at 8:08 AM on November 30, 2019
Once upon a time, I had the USNO Time Service phone number saved.
Still do! I use it to set my watch when I change time zones (usually after a flight).
I'm very attached to it because NPR uses the USNO signal for confidence audio on many of their network feeds. So during my many years running a live board in local radio, I spent a lot of time listening to it through the cue speaker. It's ridiculously comforting.
My dream is to record a full 24 hours of the feed so I can, when it is inevitably shut down, make my own version.
posted by god hates math at 9:58 AM on November 30, 2019 [3 favorites]
Still do! I use it to set my watch when I change time zones (usually after a flight).
I'm very attached to it because NPR uses the USNO signal for confidence audio on many of their network feeds. So during my many years running a live board in local radio, I spent a lot of time listening to it through the cue speaker. It's ridiculously comforting.
My dream is to record a full 24 hours of the feed so I can, when it is inevitably shut down, make my own version.
posted by god hates math at 9:58 AM on November 30, 2019 [3 favorites]
CBC still plays the national research council time signal "at the beginning of the long dash" on the radio at 10AM every day. It's the only part of my Canadian identity that I'm entirely comfortable with.
posted by klanawa at 10:34 AM on November 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by klanawa at 10:34 AM on November 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
You advocate a _____ approach to calendar reform.
So you want continuous time zones
So you want to abolish time zones
posted by dmd at 12:39 PM on November 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
So you want continuous time zones
So you want to abolish time zones
posted by dmd at 12:39 PM on November 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
It's the only part of my Canadian identity that I'm entirely comfortable with.
And here's the official time in Canada!
Personal pet peeves about time: when smartphone apps do not respect the 24-hour clock preferences that I've explicitly set.
(Yes, I'm in the US where the 12-hour clock is dominant, but the whole point of that setting is to make it very clear I'm no longer interested in jerking awake right before bed because I'm suddenly unsure if my 6:30AM alarm is actually a 6:30PM alarm!*)
*To clarify, the native alarm app obviously respects this preference. This was just the final straw pushing me to adopt the 24-hour clock on my phone.
posted by andrewesque at 12:08 PM on December 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
And here's the official time in Canada!
Personal pet peeves about time: when smartphone apps do not respect the 24-hour clock preferences that I've explicitly set.
(Yes, I'm in the US where the 12-hour clock is dominant, but the whole point of that setting is to make it very clear I'm no longer interested in jerking awake right before bed because I'm suddenly unsure if my 6:30AM alarm is actually a 6:30PM alarm!*)
*To clarify, the native alarm app obviously respects this preference. This was just the final straw pushing me to adopt the 24-hour clock on my phone.
posted by andrewesque at 12:08 PM on December 1, 2019 [2 favorites]
I'm very attached to it because NPR uses the USNO signal for confidence audio on many of their network feeds. So during my many years running a live board in local radio, I spent a lot of time listening to it through the cue speaker. It's ridiculously comforting.
I was just in my car listening to NPR and they mistakenly kept this feed open on the air for a full minute or so. I was very much enjoying it. I would probably include it on my preset stations if I could.
posted by slogger at 11:26 AM on December 2, 2019 [1 favorite]
I was just in my car listening to NPR and they mistakenly kept this feed open on the air for a full minute or so. I was very much enjoying it. I would probably include it on my preset stations if I could.
posted by slogger at 11:26 AM on December 2, 2019 [1 favorite]
After a bit more digging, it appears that the voiceover was done by actor Fred Covington.
"If you dial 202-762-1401, Fred Covington will read the time to you. He’s best known as the auctioneer in Roots, but the movie website IMDb does credit him with reading USNO time. Reciting the entire 24-hour day in five-second intervals took Covington multiple days of taping in 1978; his voice does sound smoother than typical call-in services."
Sadly, I tried dialing the phone number several times and Fred never picked up.
posted by slogger at 11:59 AM on December 2, 2019
"If you dial 202-762-1401, Fred Covington will read the time to you. He’s best known as the auctioneer in Roots, but the movie website IMDb does credit him with reading USNO time. Reciting the entire 24-hour day in five-second intervals took Covington multiple days of taping in 1978; his voice does sound smoother than typical call-in services."
Sadly, I tried dialing the phone number several times and Fred never picked up.
posted by slogger at 11:59 AM on December 2, 2019
Weren't some less-secure local "time" numbers used as unofficial party lines back in the '70s (where folks calling the line at the same time would yell shout-outs and date requests in the background while the time was being read in the foreground)? Or is that just one of those you-actually-believed-that-shit urban legends? (I want to say I read it in one of Ben is Dead's "retro" issues but I don't have said issues/Retro Hell book in front of me at the moment to confirm/disprove)
posted by gtrwolf at 10:11 PM on December 18, 2019
posted by gtrwolf at 10:11 PM on December 18, 2019
Don't forget to prepare your computer for DST 2007
posted by DoctorFedora at 1:17 AM on December 19, 2019
posted by DoctorFedora at 1:17 AM on December 19, 2019
One nice thing is the signal penetrates datacenter walls, unlike the GPS signal most modern stratum 0 clocks use.
With its 5km wavelength, the 60kHz WWVB signal might well be usable in an underground nuclear bunker.
posted by flabdablet at 2:27 AM on December 21, 2019
With its 5km wavelength, the 60kHz WWVB signal might well be usable in an underground nuclear bunker.
posted by flabdablet at 2:27 AM on December 21, 2019
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posted by Harvey Kilobit at 1:05 PM on November 29, 2019 [8 favorites]