This week, I'm going to tug on time. This follows the last item in last week's issue of Thursday Threads: The Clock that Made Power Grids Possible. Two years ago, I also published an issue about time, pointing to articles about eliminating the leap second, time standards on the moon …

I'm about halfway through Saul Griffith's 2021 Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future, and I find the author makes a compelling point about bringing nearly everything—energy creation, transmission, and use—to a common factor of "electricity" and then optimizing that system. There are many interesting problems …