The folks at Radio Lab have produced a good piece on time in general. It covers a lot of materia, some of it more campy than informative, but had some new info for me at least.

 

• Spice Clock: A clock that tells you what time it is in the dark based on smells released during the night.
• Clock of Birds: A highlands people of Papua New Guinea use the songs of certain birds to determine the time of day.
• Clock of Flowers: Linnaeus carefully crafted a flower garden that had certain flowers that would unfurl at certain times of day to tell the time.
• Leif Inge produced an art installation of Beethoven’s 9th that was stretched to 24hours which sounds wonderful.

The piece ends with a discussion of how time is relative based on experience, and how the very best moments we remember in life have a feeling of a swolen now.

(Thanks to Kent Corbell, charter member 172, for sending this in)

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It is wonderful to see other modern craftsmen and artists working on machines like this again.  Eugene Sargent recently completed this beautiful Orrery commission for a client.  There is a very nice write up on the client’s web site as well as this fun video of it being produced.

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Wired is running a cool pictorial on the new amorphous metal making techniques. These “metallic glass” materials have some amazing properties for making long lasting structures. Back in 01997 or so we tested some of these metals as pendulum flexures (as seen above).  In fact there is still test pendulum hanging on one of these here at our museum. At the time however the techniques for making metallic glass limited the material to only very thin strips, and were still prone to spiral type fracturing which kept us from using it in torsional pendulums. It looks like this new technique has a kind of hybrid molecular structure, that works similarly to a composite, and stops that type of fracturing. Very cool. Cant wait to get my hands on some…

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Our good friends from The Science Museum in London (which houses our first clock prototype) have recently completed and shipped over their historic construction of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No.2 to the Computer History Museum here in California. There is a great video of it working and an explanation at Wired.com (also above, sorry about the advertisement). They are having a public opening on May 10th.

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I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.

~Danny Hillis, “The Millennium Clock“, 01995

As we at the Long Now are well aware, one thing about designing clocks is that, like any mechanical system, they can go wrong.

This 01953 sketch from Sid Caesar’s live-to-air weekly comedy program Your Show of Shows reminds us just how true that is.

The Baverhoff clock may be broken — but surprisingly, after more than half a century, the comedy still works.

(Link via Nerve.com)

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 This astonishing clock project was brought to my attention by Austin Brown via the Make blog… note in the image above the analog clock hands forming the word  FOUR in the lower right quadrant.

Dutch designer Christiaan Postma figured out how to arrange more than 150 analog clocks in such a way that at certain times, the hands line up to spell the words of the hour.

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Forbes.com has an excellent special on and about time… They were even nice enough to publish one of my answers to their “What is Time” question in the article by Elizabeth Evans.

Time is a Dimension

Time’s Sleight Of Hand By Brian GreeneWhatever it is, time doesn’t behave the way you would think.

A Brief History Of Time Machines By David ToomeyThe truth may be stranger than fiction.

Time is Money

The Price Of Time By Paul MaidmentTime is a strange economic good, difficult to price and easy to waste.

The Money Meter By David M. Ewalt & Blair EllisThey say time is money. How much is yours worth?

Time is Flying

A Cure For Chronocentrism By Tim PowersTo a leap day baby, time is more like an unfenced landscape than the clicking of an odometer.

Peace Time By David A. AndelmanBack in the simpler days of 1919, at the Paris peace talks, the whole world was redrawn under different rules of time and space.

Time is Measured

The World’s Oldest Working Clock By Parmy OlsonSalisbury’s cathedral’s clock is still ticking after more than 600 years.

Collections: Vintage Rolexes By Nicola RuizEvan Zimmermann has a lucrative passion for old watches.

• In Pictures: The World’s Most Expensive Watches

Time Is Perception

What Is Time? By Elisabeth EavesIt speeds up, slows down, and stands still.

Is Time Just A Trick Of The Mind? By Lionel LaurentNotions of past, present and future may be our way of filling in the blanks.

Time is Up

The End By Steve AlmondAll significant data now point to the same unwelcome conclusion.

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A designer named Acanthusleaf posted in the LiveJournal Clockworker’s Guild community commentary and pics of this latest project, a gorgeous armillary ring, not unlike a very, very tiny rendition of The Clock’s Orrery:

This past week and a half, I have been obsessed with making this ring. It is a variation on one pictured in Historic Rings by Diana Scarisbrick. I would want to be her when I grow up, but I want to make the stuff as well as study and write books about it. The original opens out at a 90 degree angle to the outer ring, but I can never leave well enough alone, and I figured a shallower angle would evoke more of that armillary sphere effect that she claims was the point of the original.

This entry, I believe, signifies the official coining of the term “Clockpunk”. I think it will catch on as a meme; after all, steam is hot, but gears are gripping.

Thusly, it has also been proven that LiveJournal is not just for emo kids and bad poetry.

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The world of high end watches can get very strange. Where the least function with the highest complication, fetch the highest praise and highest price. This particular piece is no exception, but caught my eye however as I like the vague and slow representation of time. A watch using one of the most intricate mechanical movements yet devised for time keeping, the tourbillion, that basically only tells you if it is day or night. At $300k the target audience must be very well to do Vampires and Orcs.

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 Many times over the years here at Long Now we have discussed the idea of a lifetime or century clock.  Betrand Planes has now made one.  A clock that ticks of 84 years…  (thanks for sending JD)

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