A fine and inexpensive timepiece.

The Seiko PADI Solar Model SNE435P1

A friend is an expert on watches and helped me with the decision to buy an inexpensive yet robust timepiece. I have got tired of inflicting damage on costly Swiss timepieces and the related maintenance agonies which last seemingly forever. Last time my Patek Philippe Nautilus was in for replacement of a broken bracelet clasp the service took – wait for it – 9 months.

The Seiko PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) diver’s watch uses a quartz movement, charging its battery through solar cells embedded in the dial. These are so skillfully hidden as to be invisible to the naked eye, and will recharge from any light source. Once fully charged the watch will run for 10 months, according to the manufacturer.

The watch’s appearance is a rip off of the Rolex Submariner with two differences. It’s quartz, not automatic, so far more accurate. And the rotating bezel is screen printed like earlier Submariners. Later ones are enameled for greater longevity.

This is an excellent watch for the rider of a classic motorcycle which has no clock installed. Like my 1975 BMW R90/6 air cooled twin. That’s because the visibility of the hands is very high, requiring only a quick glance at speed and meaning that you do not have to angle your wrist this way and that for a reading.

After many days of checking – you can freeze the seconds hand when setting the watch against a know accurate time source like Apple – the watch is dead accurate, having neither gained or lost as much as one second. The only time you are going to be adjusting the time is at the end of short months when the crown is rotated to advance the date. By contrast the Rolex is guaranteed to +/- 2 seconds a day, or up to one minute a month, which is disappointing on so costly a timepiece.

The Lumibrite fluorescence of the hands is excellent though it rather fades after 3-4 hours. The outer diameter of the dial is 43.5mm suitable for medium and larger wrists. I has to remove one link for a good fit, as well as setting the clasp on its shortest of four positions.

The bracelet is not, however, Rolex quality, using a mix of stainless stampings and castings. The pin and collar mechanism used to connect links is a horror story necessitating that a small 2mm collar is installed one side as the pin is pushed in from the other after removal of link(s). Chances are your jeweler is clueless and will lose the collar, meaning the bracelet will eventually fall apart. Check out online videos, splash out $5 on a pusher tool and do it yourself. The bracelet rattles off the wrist but is fine once in place. The deployment mechanism uses both a clasp and a push button release as a failsafe. While aftermarket bracelets are available for many Seikos, none has yet been made for this model. They tend to be better quality and use screws, not pins, to connect the links. Typically priced around the $100 mark you can buy ten before approaching the cost of the repair on my Nautilus.

Price is incredibly low for what you get. I paid $300 at Amazon. That’s less than the round trip shipping of your Rolex to Geneva when it breaks down, and it will. The happy Seiko owner simply recycles his PADI and buys a new one. He is also $15,000 richer, money which can be spent on scuba gear and lessons.

Fans of automatic movements can spend $50-100 more for the Automatic Turtle (SRPA21J1) or the Automatic PADI (SRPA21) which will get you less accuracy and a short 41 hour power reserve. Replacement aftermarket bracelets for those models are readily available. All are guaranteed leakproof down to 200 meters (660 feet).

The Solar has a date only display with a cyclops magnifier for better visibility. The Automatic PADI and Turtle have day and date displays, unmagnified. Accuracy of the automatic watches is specified by Seiko (4R36 movement) as +45/-35 seconds a day which is, frankly, awful, but can probably be tuned for better performance. None of these qualifies as a ‘dress’ watch, but as I gave away all my suits and ties years ago, ask me if I care.

Highly recommended.

Update after one month of use:

The Seiko gained just 3 seconds. Given that the date has to be advanced mostly every other month, I’ll simply ‘hack’ it at that time to lose the 3 seconds or so it has gained.

Public education.

I wrote this a while back and, for some reason, did not publish it. I was reminded of the horror of US public school ‘education’ when Pig’s miserable Education Secretary resigned the other day. So here it is.

When Eisenhower was president (1952-60) America boasted the finest public schooling system on the planet. Today, that system is the worst in the Western Hemisphere.

I was forcefully reminded of this fact over the past few weeks which saw my son laboring mightily over his Algebra II studies. These studies were dictated by the need to catch up with the mainstream at his high school and reflected the glacial progress at his former public intermediate school in California which saw to it that the pace of teaching was aimed at the dumbest and slowest, not at the best and brightest. This is the result of a system which regards education as a right, not as a privilege.

Notes from my son’s summer Algebra II studies.

With the curriculum approved by the head of Mathematics at his prep school, he started classes at the local school district in Arizona only to express a strong desire to quit after one day. Understandable when you realize that his fellow students comprised juniors who had failed the subject in 11th grade and were being forced to retake Algebra II before their senior year. Not what you would call a supportive peer group. Add to that the fact that the teacher would clearly be some place other than in the classroom, mistaking rote recitation for teaching, and you can see where the boy was coming from. He quickly switched to online tuition – a choice not without its own issues – and elected yours truly as teacher and mentor. This was a risky move given that I last studied algebra in the previous milenium, but the alternative was too awful to contemplate.

The fall in the quality of American schooling is attributable to many factors, but one dominates. The Teachers’ Union has but one interest at heart and that is self preservation. And hang the kids. They accomplish this goal by ensuring that it is virtually impossible to fire a public school teacher for performance. The data attest to this fact. A recent article in “American Teacher’ stated that just 0.2% of tenured teachers were fired in the past five years. In any meritocracy that number should be ten to fifty times higher. In New York City, where a rational observer would expect public school education to be the best in the nation, firings of teachers are virtually unheard of.

And how was that online tuition? Mostly awful. Irrelevant jokey introductions to classes then switched to rambling text. Not once in the over 100 lessons was there a clear opening exposition of the equations being taught, these being lost in the turgid text. Wild jumps and omissions of logic made the quizzes doubly difficult and we found ourselves frequently making side trips to Khan Academy videos on the internet in a desperate effort to figure out what on earth was going on. Worst, none of this math tuition was focused on the real world and real problem solving. All is cast in the abstract and a heavy dose of rote and memorization is the seemingly preferred path to success. None of this is surprising. The Teachers’ Union must be mightily threatened at the prospect of their teachers being obsoleted by superior machine learning, so it’s hardly in their interest to craft a high quality online system.

The ten best public high school systems in the world, according to The Independent are:

• Finland – #1
• Switzerland
• Belgium
• Singapore
• Holland
• Qatar
• Ireland
• Estonia
• New Zealand
• Japan – #10

America? Nowhere in sight. I rather doubt it even made the top 100.

Perhaps the most galling aspect of this is that we now have an Education Secretary – a misnomer if there ever was one – who has never set foot in a public school and whose appointment hearing disclosed a thorough ignorance of public schooling. Then again, this is hardly surprising in a nation which increasingly denigrates education as something reserved for the ‘liberal elites’. Sadly, as a taxpayer I cannot opt out of funding this crime against the people, and insult is added to injury when the realization dawns that the $300,000 I will spend on my son’s prep school education includes not one penny of tax deductible outlay. Instead of rewarding my success the United States is punishing me for it.

Is there a fix to this chamber of horrors? Of course there is. Much as the criminal Airline Pilots Association was bankrupted by an earlier administration and put out of business, so should the Teacher’s union of today be treated. Then a strict merit system with the lowest performing 10% fired for cause annually for the next decade will dramatically increase the quality of teaching. There is no greater weapon in a nation’s arsenal than the quality of its education. We can easily deflect 10% of our ridiculous military budget, now approaching $1 trillion – the very ‘military industrial complex’ Ike ranted against in his final presidential speech – and spend the $100 billion thus realized on attracting the best and brightest to the front of the class, reestablishing once again the pride and joy of that nation under Ike.

As for my son, he scored a straight A on his classes, but what did you expect given the quality of instruction? And no, he will not be migrating to the public schooling system from his prep school in Massachusetts.