Bespoke martian watches keep 24h, 39m day

Researchers working on the Mars lander are rising and sleeping on Martian Standard Time, the daylight hours on the lander's plot of Mars. The martian day is 24h, 39m long — which means that the rover crew had to get custom-made timepieces (for "had to," here, read, "thought it would be really cool to") manufactured for them by a master watchmaker.

My next novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, (due out in just a few weeks!) revolves around the way that your sleep schedule determines a lot about your social circle and hence your beliefs, alliegances, and so forth. A friend of mine in DC who used to work for the CIA just read the book and wrote to point out that the military has been running timezone-tribes for years, so that all the people commanding and supporting some distant operational unit are rising and sleeping on a schedule synched with daylight hours in some far corner.

But I bet they don't get cool watches like this one — someone should manufacture and sell 'em. My sleep-schedule is so scr0d that I would happily wear this thing and abide by what it told me about my circadian.

Link

(via MeFi)