Frank and Ernest - Sunday May 27, 2001 Comic Strip Licensing and Permissions

Transcript

"Timekeeping: Mankind has constantly improved the technology of keeping time. Ancient societies had celestial calendars to measure the days of the year. Sundials and early mechanical clocks divided the days into smaller units. In the seventeenth centry pendulum clocks kept time accurate to within a few seconds per day and by the nineteenth centry they were within hundredths of a second. Further improvements came with the quartz cloth, and today atomic clocks are accurate to about one-millionth of a second per day!" "Look, Frank... this says we can measure time in really tiny bits. I wonder -- what is the smallest fraction of time there is?" "I'm not sure. It's either between when the polls close and when the networks declare a winner, or the time between when the traffic signal turns green and the driver behind you honks his horn."

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