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Coolest clock ever?

 
 
Quantum
12:20 / 21.09.08
The Corpus Clock cost a million pounds, and was unveiled by Stephen Hawking on Friday. Atop it sits a Chronophage, a weird creature that eats time, and it's the coolest thing I've seen in ages.



"It is terrifying, it is meant to be," said John Taylor, the creator and funder of an extraordinary new clock to be unveiled tomorrow by Stephen Hawking at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. "Basically I view time as not on your side. He'll eat up every minute of your life, and as soon as one has gone he's salivating for the next. It's not a bad thing to remind students of. I never felt like this until I woke up on my 70th birthday, and was stricken at the thought of how much I still wanted to do, and how little time remained."


It'a about as cool as the clock of the long now, what cool clocks can you show me Barbelith?
 
 
Colonel Kadmon
22:32 / 21.09.08
Would love to share more cool clocks...

Yet so little time left to spare...
 
 
astrojax69
06:17 / 22.09.08
this is cool, if spooky and i also think
this clock has an interesting aesthetic.
 
 
astrojax69
09:53 / 22.09.08
ooh, and now this doozy
 
 
astrojax69
02:27 / 23.09.08
'cool if spooky' and the nice aesthetic seem to have developed 'issues' - i opened them and found a lot of guff after the ".html" bit - delete that and retry - can a mod fix these links for me?? muchos gracias - and just in time! [groans, wanders away abashed]
 
 
grant
19:13 / 23.09.08
---
You hit a hard return within the quote marks surrounding the url - like so...

href="http://whatever.net/thing.html
">
-----

I've always been partial to the Song clock, which was built during the Song Dynasty (around 1070) but was dismantled either by or just ahead of invading Jurchens. By the time it was safe to put back together, no one was sure exactly how to do it.

It was also assembled in an odd city in China - about 500 or 600 years after the clock was built, a Dominican missionary turned up, started trying to explain to people about the 10 commandments and found they already knew 'em. There'd been a Jewish community there for hundreds of years. No one is sure how they got there.

Anyway, the clock is pretty awesome - the oldest known chain drive (like a cuckoo clock or a bicycle), built with an armillary sphere (like a planetarium) on the top level... here's one description:
The clock tower consisted of three levels. The upper level contained an armillary sphere. This represented "the great circles of the heavens" which allowed astrologers to make accurate astronomical observations. On the middle level, there was a celestial globe which displayed the movements of celestial bodies, and the bottom level had wooden mannequins which struck the time of day. The whole tower formed a single mechanism which was turned by water power, without any human effort. The clock's precision was comparable to a sundial (Bulliet 333). The sphere was comprised of 12 rings in three layers, each of the rings being marked with a scale. From the sphere one could directly read off the positions of the 24 Solar Terms, and could find a star or planet by looking through a sighting tube.


The Taiwanese government managed to recreate Su Song's clock tower on a smaller scale in the 1990s.

Outside:


Inside:
 
  
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