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Welcome to the Kotke ride Home for July 23, 2021.

I'm Glenn Fleischman, finishing out two weeks, subbing for Jackson Bird, who is on vacation.

Rounding errors may cause winners to become losers, and losers' winners.

Bezos and James Webb both fall to earth.

And beyond lobster shortages, now crabs.

Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

Rounding errors in digital stopwatches may be affecting the outcomes of athletic competitions,

a new paper in the American Journal of Physics suggests, quote, we present and analyze

race times obtained from swimming competitions. The data give a clear demonstration of anomalous

stopwatch timing patterns, which can only be explained by rounding error. It is also shown that

such rounding error can result in a set of times being wrongly ordered in

the context of a sporting event. This could lead to the incorrect ranking of athletes and hence

the incorrect awarding of race positions." End quote. The issue is how digital timing devices

count the passage of time. While there aren't gears and escapements, a digital timekeeping

unit does track a physical property. A piece of quartz is cut into the shape of a tiny

tuning fork and very small amounts of power keep the quartz vibrating continuously.

The quartz used has a vibrational rate of 32,768 hertz or oscillations per second. A circuit of which the quartz

...