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Friday, January 26, 2007

Friday afternoon's ingenious idea

So you're the kind of person who's always late. And you're the kind of person who has been trying to correct that for years. And you're a little clever, so you've set all your clocks forward a few minutes to accomplish this. But, uh, unless you're a fool, you've learned that the clock is in fact fast, since you set it that way, and that you can correct for it and cut it as close as ever. Without allowing for traffic or subway trouble.

But wait! What if there were a clock that was fast, but you couldn't know how fast. You just know that it's probably fast but varies within a certain range of the actual time. So you couldn't trust that it was 15 minutes ahead. Could be two minutes. You better get going.

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