Finally some good news about education! Problem is, it’s not in Georgia. A Florida state judge has ruled unconstitutional Governor Bush’s school voucher plan! Bush’s plan allowed students in "failing" schools to receive a voucher of over $3000 per year to attend private schools. The judges decision was based solely on the wording of the Florida state constitution which provides only for state tax support of "public" education. The wording in the Florida constitution is almost identical to that of ours here in Georgia.

Last week I wrote a little about time. It seems as the years pass, that they go by with ever increasing speed. I realized that this is true. One year, to a child of 10, is a whopping 10% of his life. A pretty significant portion! To someone who’s 50 years old, one year is but 2%.

How close can we measure a second? The U.S. Naval Observatory, our official timekeeper, uses atomic clocks measuring in nanoseconds. A nanosecond is one billionth of a second, about the time it take a beam of light to travel 10 inches or so! The accuracy of this measurement is far more important than for just setting our watches. Our navigation systems, Loran-C and the Global Positioning System (GPS), used for aircraft, ships, and other such things as cruise missiles, gain their accuracy from time differentials. The closer we measure time, the more accurately we can estimate our location. The Navy offers GPS users two different services. The Standard Positioning Service, available to all GPS users, is supposed to be accurate to within 100 meters horizontally and 156 meters vertically with a time accuracy of 340 nanoseconds. The Precise Positioning Service is a highly accurate military positioning, velocity and timing service which is available only to military and U.S. Federal Government users, is supposed to be accurate to within 22 meters horizontally and 27.7 meters vertically with a time accuracy of 200 nanoseconds.

These are the figures the government admits to… but my own experience at navigation tells me they are much more accurate… it’s not that difficult to pilot a boat to a particular spot of underwater debris. Think too about our military bragging of sending missiles into a particular roof vent… What we don’t know, hmm.

I think I’ll go reset my clocks… see ya next week! tomiswho@mindspring.com