MetaFilter posts tagged with clocks

New Furniture Design Ideas

netbros — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 11:58:59 -0800

Modern Furniture Designs. Innovative and unique furniture has twists and turns, literal and conceptual ways of breaking from contemporary conventions and modern regularity. These creative furniture designs go beyond merely innovative, crossing boundaries of industrial, furniture and architectural design, using new methods and materials along the way.

All this and I didn't link to the Time Cube

metaBugs — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:45:54 -0800

Timepieces! Ancient calendars, ancient clocks, beautiful clocks, atomic clocks and the clocks built into your brain that determine how you perceive time and form memories. All the good stuff is inside: How we count and perceive time is fascinating. Very early civilisations developed sophisticated calendars: the Sumerians 5,000 years ago in what's now Iraq; Stonehenge 4,000 years ago (and more recently, ManhattanHenge); the Chinese calendar system between 3,500 - 4,000 years ago; Calendars from North American societies dating from 500BC; the Julian Calendar from 45BC; and finally our current Gregorian calendar in 1582. Much younger but arguably just as important as the other calendars is Epoch or Unix time, the common time counted by UNIX and LINUX-based computers worldwide, providing a foundation for communication across networks. (previously) More recently, clocks have become crucial. Harrison's very beautiful series of clocks (H1, H2, H3, H4) were accurate enough to calculate longitude and opened the seas for reliable trade, exploration and systematic mapping. The spread of fast travel by rail lead to the standardisation of time zones, with towns in Britain and the USA moving from local solar time to "railway time". Knowing the right time rapidly became a commodity: three generations of the Belville family made their living by providing London's clock-owning homes and businesses with the correct time. Our best atomic clocks can now be accurate to within 1 second every 300 million years and are essential for systems like GPS and global communications. At the other end of the scale, the Long Now foundation wants to build a clock to measure 10,000 years. If you'd prefer something a little more practical, you could always get this wall-mounted 100 year alarm clock instead. We have a multitude of different clocks ticking away inside our brains and bodies. An healthy heart, for example, will keep a steady rhythm indefinitely without any signals from the brain. Our second best-known timekeeper is the suprachiasmatic nucleus. It keeps us on an amazingly accurate cycle that averages 24h11m +- 16 minutes, keeping our bodies to this cycle even if forced to live a 28-hour day or living in a light-free cave with no watch. This 24-hour cycle controls an amazing array of bodily functions, including hormone levels, body temperature, your immune system's activity and much more. It gets re-adjusted daily by sunlight so we can trick it into adopting longer days, which will be useful for when humans get to Mars. Jet-lag sufferers (whose "deep sleep" clock becomes detached from their REM sleep clock) know that this isn't nearly enough, so will be interested that eating breakfast after at least 16 hours without food beats jet lag by immediately kicking your cycle into "morning" mode, at least in mice and one Formula 1 driver (about 50 minutes in, probably UK only). Shorter times (fractions of seconds to hours) are counted by several different systems including the basal ganglia and the parietal lobe. The rate at which these clocks tick determines how fast we perceive the world and form memories; so by altering these ticks we can seem to speed time up or slow it down. It's well known that various drugs can affect our perceptions of time: Caffeine makes time go slower, anaesthetics make it speed up. THC can give a sense of timelessness, possibly by blocking a a clock circuit that measures time in the seconds to minutes range. Memory load, time of day and mood also have effects, but surprisingly, one of the biggest factors seems to be body temperature. Just like in The Matrix, fear really does make time seem to go slower, letting us pick out details that otherwise we couldn't perceive. Some people claim that they've learned to exploit this in sports and actually stretch their perception of time to see the ball moving slower to get an advantage. Finally, this is what started me down this train of thought: a thought-provoking radio programme from the BBC, in which an astrophysicist, a classicist and an author talk about what time means to them.

Clock Evolution Model

Stunt — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 00:01:03 -0800

Natural selection and evolution in clocks(youtube) - Video of the details and results of a program written to model the evolution of clocks (if they were alive). It seems that it was done to disprove a strawman argument used to argue in favor of creationism by some (an argument I hadn't personally heard used before). Found here, and explained in more detail than I can offer.

Guerilla clockmaking

nicolas léonard sadi carnot — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 03:27:15 -0800

Untergunther, a chapter of the Parisian cultural guerilla organisation UX (most memorably responsible for setting up a secret theatre in the catacombs under the Seine in 2004), unveil their latest project - a clock-restoration workshop hidden in the Pantheon dome! The group's own report and pictures here.

People time

gwint — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:53:30 -0800

Human Calendar (See also: World Clock. Previously: Human Clock, Yugo's clock)

New York's Official Clock Master

jonson — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 23:03:24 -0800

Marvin Schneider, New York City's Official Clock Master is responsible for keeping the giant public clocks of the five boroughs running smoothly; the beautiful photo essay with an accompanying interview is not to be missed for fans of giant gears & sprockets.

Sculptural Wooden Clocks

OmieWise — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 12:25:05 -0800

Timeshapes: The wooden clocks of Jim Borden. Suspended clocks. Table clocks. Wall clocks. His 30-foot clock. The clock making process. He's even listed in the Online Movement Catalog.

The Angel of Hour

hortense — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 17:36:08 -0800

The Angels of the Hours offer us the opportunity to direct our lives from within,not being swept along by the demands of the clock.By living in the real rhythms of the day we become more real...(real audio) .

Drip drip drip...

arse_hat — Sun, 26 Dec 2004 18:48:10 -0800

Between whimsy and science lay the water clocks of Bernard Gitton.

I

31d1 — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 13:57:03 -0800

self-reference in song led me to self-reference in story, to quines in brainf**k, also alarm clocks for some reason, and finally here.

What time isn't it?

Cryptical Envelopment — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 20:27:49 -0800

Internet Clocks, Counters and Countdowns

Don't believe, don't don't don't believe the hype

mathowie — Wed, 26 Nov 2003 10:37:06 -0800

Make this year's xmas a special one by buying the Flavor Flav Talking Alarm Clock with five alarm phrases "Bass In Your Face, Get Up Get Down, Yo G Yo, Yeaa Boy." Have you seen any other similarly bizarre gifts on sale this holiday season?

Bzzzt

Mwongozi — Sun, 26 Oct 2003 17:06:51 -0800

Mike's Electric Stuff
Glass tubes and high voltages galore. Of particular interest, tesla coils, and how to build a clock using nixie tubes, the prettiest display devices ever invented. If you can't build your own, other people will do it for you.

Interesting way to look at time

kristin — Tue, 09 Sep 2003 08:05:56 -0800

The cable clock. This clocks tells time, just like any other clock, but the movement of the hands is hypnotic and beautiful. To physicists, time is defined by quantum mechanics. A photon with energy h (Planck's constant) behaves as though it were oscillating once per second. For Philosphers, time is less concrete, and they love to talk about it. Western society lives by the clock - does it make a difference if this is the kind of clock that you live by? After all, everyone knows that time is money. If you have to be a clock watcher, does it help if the clock is as calming as the Cable Clock is?

clocks

ginz — Thu, 05 Jun 2003 08:17:07 -0800

Clocks have been posted before. Here's a new fun one called blokklok.

Clocks

Pretty_Generic — Wed, 07 May 2003 19:25:33 -0800

Clocks

baylink — Sat, 05 Jan 2002 18:36:53 -0800

Does anybody really know what time it is? If anybody really cares, the NIST is the place to go for not only the answers (including a list of government operated open access NTP servers), but more information than you probably ever wanted to know about standard time.

adrober — Sat, 27 Oct 2001 23:17:02 -0800

Happy Daylight Savings Time! Don't forget to set your clocks back and enjoy that glorious extra hour of sleep...

m.polo — Fri, 27 Jul 2001 18:29:26 -0800

Stolen shamelessly from Tom: a charming clock, reminding us once again that "time" is an intellectual concept meaningless without human participation... (Don't miss the webserver, either.) Considering the depth and breadth - and apparent copious free time - of the MeFi community one would hope we'd be able to help fill in some of the still unphotographed minutes.

Max's Daddy — Tue, 21 Mar 2000 22:46:22 -0800

The gnarly clock Here is a sweet clock, which is fun to play with Check it out!