Welcome to Gotham’s first annual holiday quiz. Be the first to answer all questions correctly, and you could win the grand prize: the chance to be Nick Huston’s date to the Post Works-Orbit Digital Christmas Party (beware of the mistletoe!).

“You don’t have to run long errands through Paris to notice numerous clocks, both public and private, that disagree – which one is the biggest liar? In fact if even just one is lying one suspects the sincerity of them all.”
- Albert Favarger, engineer and watchmaker, addressing the International Congress on Chronometry in Paris, 1900

Favarger was arguing that the world’s clocks should be coordinated by a vast electrical network tied to a central, observatory linked master clock. The following riddle would probably have driven him bonkers:

Suppose I have 4 Deneke GR-1's and an Atomic Clock accurate to within a few picoseconds.

• I set GR-1 #1 to 30 ND.
• I set GR-1 #2 to 30 DROP
• I set GR-1 #3 to 29.97 ND
• I set GR-1 #4 to 29.97 DROP

Each GR-1 is set to 00:00:00:00. When the Atomic Clock strikes midnight, it instantaneously triggers the GR-1 boxes to begin counting forward.

The Question: When the Atomic Clock reaches 1:00am, what is the time code displayed by each GR-1, and what is the corresponding elapsed time of that time code? The winner and the answer will be announced in the next Gotham Gazette. Deadline is December 14th at 5pm. Email your answer to answer@gothamsound.com.

Incidentally, Favarger almost got his wish - but in the form of radio waves. Henri Poincare and his team began transmitting the world’s first time-code signal from atop the Eiffel Tower on May 23rd, 1910. Poincare’s version of time-code was devastatingly simple: A single beep was transmitted every 1.01 seconds starting at midnight, thus allowing you to calculate “Paris time” by counting the time between beeps.

The Eiffel Tower system was replaced by our modern day satellite based GPS system, but not without controversy: When the GPS system was first deployed, engineers were divided about whether Einstein’s Theory of Relativity applied to the satellites. Unlike most satellites, GPS satellites travel in a 12 hour orbit some 12,000 miles above the Earth. Einstein’s theories state that time would move slower for the satellites by 7 milliseconds per day because of their speed relative to our speed on the ground and faster by 45 milliseconds per day due to the weaker gravitational field in space, for a total offset of 38 milliseconds per day. A compromise was reached: Leave the “Einstein” correction in the satellite, but don’t turn it on unless the satellite was sending a “flawed” signal. Within two days after the satellite began transmitting, ground control realized that the timing information was off by almost exactly the predicted amount, resulting in erroneous positions of nearly six miles. Needless to say, the “Einstein” correction was turned on.

Kind of makes our Drop Frame/Non-Drop Frame and .1% calculations seem like child’s play, doesn’t it?

Happy Holidays!