[LEAPSECS] we thought it was a joke

Steve Allen sla at ucolick.org
Wed May 23 14:50:12 EDT 2012


Way back in 2003 we joked about the medical consequences of time.
file:///usr/local/www/sla/leapsecs/reductio.html

Here we see an interesting quote
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/05/medical-devices
"It is a slew of malpractice suits waiting to happen."
Note also the remarks about what daylight time does to hospital ops.

and, of course, there is already the de rigueur flame war discussing it
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/05/23/1558257/know-what-time-it-is-your-medical-device-doesnt

In my mother's hospital room the wall clock was off. I pulled it down
and saw the WWVB timezone buttons. I pushed them in a way that should
have triggered the clock to reset to WWVB, but nothing happened. A
bit of digging around on the net revealed that model of clock was made
by some Chinese company which did make WWVB synchronized clocks. They
also made just plain quartz clocks without radios and sold them with
the same plastic chassis as their radio clocks. I reset the clock
manually, and it was well.

--
Steve Allen <sla at ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS)
UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855
1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015
Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m


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