• Diego (unregistered) in reply to ssprencel
    ssprencel:
    It's a type-declaration character. Maybe on this page F = 5.

    actually, it is a BASIC variable exposed by a bug of the news software 8)

  • (cs) in reply to Watson
    Watson:
    Analogue clocks operate by drawing an analogy between the periodicity in the passage of days and the periodicity in the behaviour of a rotating shaft. And while digital clocks (of the wristwatch and bedside table variety, at least) have vibrating quartz oscillators buried inside them, they don't care about the precise nature of those movements (in the way that an analogue clock cares about the precise position of its moving parts), all it cares about is counting those oscillations.

    (Which is why of course you can have digital clocks with analogue displays - the display is analogous to that of an analogue clock....)

    All clocks consist of two parts: an analog part and a digital part. The analog part does something over and over again at a constant rate. Sometimes it must be meticulously adjusted to achieve the constant rate. A pendulum swings back and forth, or a crystal vibrates physically, or an electronic oscillator oscillates, or a wheel spins, or (for a sundial) the Earth turns on its axis. In an atomic clock, things happen for non-deterministic reasons and therefore not at a constant rate, but for probabilistic reasons a predictable and nearly-constant number of these things happen each second.

    The digital part quantizes, counts and reports. The quantization may be as simple and crude as a line between 3 and 4 on a sundial (we can add one binary digit of precision by saying "half past three"). It may count a number of oscillations and report one second (one oscillation for a grandfather clock, four or five for a wristwatch, thousands or millions for a quartz clock).

    I suppose you could divide all clocks into those that count discrete events (quartz clocks and atomic clocks, for instance), those that measure continuous phenomena (sundials, hourglasses, water clocks) and those that do both (a grandfather clock counts oscillations, moving a wheel by a constant amount per oscillation, eventually moving a pointer in a quasi-continuous manner along a measuring surface).

  • Oli (unregistered) in reply to newfweiler
    newfweiler:
    I suppose you could divide all clocks into those that count discrete events (quartz clocks and atomic clocks, for instance), those that measure continuous phenomena (sundials, hourglasses, water clocks) (...)

    Dude! Hourglasses are discrete-event devices!!

  • Jordanwb (unregistered) in reply to el jaybird
    el jaybird:
    That looks a lot like the Ottawa Citizen... hmm...

    Hey you're right.

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