Make-A-Clock

Clock

Adaptive Curmudgeon posts a fine story about 3D printing a clock.

LEGO Mangle rack clock

LEGO Mangle rack clock
Akiyuki Brick Channel
Saw GIF of this but I couldn't figure out just what it was supposed to be doing. Awful lot of monkey motion for a clock, and it wasn't clear that it was made of LEGOs. A little digging turned up this video. Very cool. 

One of the more clever parts was the design of the 11:1 gear reduction. He needed this because of the output speed of the LEGO motor.

I hate to think how much money he spent on this, but I suppose it's like any hobby. If he spent a thousand dollars on it, and then spent a thousand hours building it, that's only a dollar an hour, which is pretty cheap entertainment.

I did not find a parts list, though this video only came out last month. Akiyuki has provided parts lists for other projects, so we may see a parts list sometime soon. The motorcycle kit he referenced costs $230, though you can apparently get the same kit from a vendor on Etsy for $100. Don't know how that works. LEGO made too many? China cloned the kit? They fell off the back of a truck? Who knows, certainly not me.

Puzzle Pic of the Day

Cleaning Big Ben
110 Pieces

Don't think I've seen a picture of Big Ben with such detail before. The Roman Numerals are almost unreadable. They are arranged with the bottom of the letters pointing to the center and the top facing the outer rim, so while the letters at the 6 o'clock position might look like i n, it is actually VI upside down. The X doesn't look much like any X I've ever seen.

Just what you need, a V-16 watch

The Jacob & Co. Bugatti Chiron Baguette Black and Orange Sapphires
Jacob & Co.

On one hand it's totally ridiculous. On the other the design and construction of it kept some very talented people employed for a while. If they weren't gainfully employed, who knows what kind of mischief they might get up to. Also, it's no more ridiculous than the car, which is also totally ridiculous, but they are both kind of cool as examples of what is possible.

Via Ross

Update September 2024 replaced missing video.

Torrazzo of Cremona

Cremona Cathedral

I'm reading The Note-Books of Captain Coignet. Chapter 3 finds him in northern Italy. When he visits Cremona he is impressed by the clock on the cathedral:

The town is considerable; there is a handsome cathedral with an immense dial; an arrow-hand makes the circuit of it once in a hundred years.

Cremona Cathedral Clock Face

It looks like this clock has 5 hands and one or two rotating dials. The face has six scales, from the outside in:

• the hour in Roman Numerals, from 1 to 24, clockwise starting at the bottom
• the names of the constellations of the zodiac
• a line of approximately 100 black dashes
• icons of the constellations
• the 12 months of the year
• another line of 100 dashes, this time in red
• numbers indicating day of the month or something.

The innermost black faced dial might be showing the phase of the moon, currently showing it as 'full'.
The numbered scale around it shows the day of the month and goes from 1 to 29 and a plus sign.

Detail of inner portion of clock face

I am not sure what the five hands are for. The one that reaches the central pivot is the time in hours. The other four have so sort of icon attached near the base. One is the sun, another is the moon, and seems to be attached to the moon phase disk. I have no idea what the other two symbols are, or how you would interpret what they are pointing to.

And I still don't know which hand indicates the passing of the years.

Google Maps 3D view of Cremona Cathedral

I would have provided links to the source of the images, but Google can't find them today even though it served them up just yesterday.

Keeping Time

My own Discworld "Vetinari Clock"
Inspired by a comment on a Reddit joke.

When I was in high school there was a wall clock in each classroom. The clocks were all controlled by a master controller in the office. After school the power was shut down and the clocks stopped. In the morning, the power is turned on, and the master controller pulses all the clocks rapidly until they caught up to the correct time. At any rate, that was the story I heard. Now that I think about it, they could have just stopped the clocks at 6PM and then resumed at 6AM and it would have accomplished the same thing.

It seems like an awfully involved system for keeping the clocks running on time. I suppose the one advantage it has is that if there is a power failure, you only have to update the time on the master clock. You don't have to go around to all the classrooms and set the time on each clock individually. It might have been an IBM system. It sounds like something they would do.

Cold War Gadget of the Day

HP 5061A Cesium Beam atomic clock

For sale on craigslist. I especially like the "MUSEUM ITEM DO NOT DISPOSE" sticker on the front panel. I also like that Wikipedia has the same picture. You don't suppose this is a scam, do you?

The Univesity of Queensland has a good summary of this device.

Via Posthip Scott.

Polar Clock

Looking for information on Sun Stones and the Solar Compass, I came across a reference to Charles Wheatstone's Polar Clock. Wikipedia has a fine article about Wheatstone. Wheatstone is best known as the inventor of the Wheatstone Bridge, which is some kind of electrical apparatus.

Wheatstone's Polar Clock, by William H. Darker, Lambeth, c. 1848

The Polar Clock gets a paragraph of its own:

One of Wheatstone's most ingenious devices was the 'Polar clock,' exhibited at the meeting of the British Association in 1848. It is based on the fact discovered by Sir David Brewster, that the light of the sky is polarised in a plane at an angle of ninety degrees from the position of the sun. It follows that by discovering that plane of polarisation, and measuring its azimuth with respect to the north, the position of the sun, although beneath the horizon, could be determined, and the apparent solar time obtained. The clock consisted of a spyglass, having a nicol (double-image) prism for an eyepiece, and a thin plate of selenite for an object-glass. When the tube was directed to the North Pole—that is, parallel to the Earth's axis—and the prism of the eyepiece turned until no colour was seen, the angle of turning, as shown by an index moving with the prism over a graduated limb, gave the hour of day. The device is of little service in a country where watches are reliable; but it formed part of the equipment of the 1875–1876 North Polar expedition commanded by Captain Nares.

Selenite, a Gypsum crystal

Watch Me

We start with this ad full of red cloaked demons and a couple of insidiously cute girls:


Pit Stop - Breitling TV commercial
which leads to this video of a guy taking apart a very fancy watch and repairing it


Service and repair of a rusty valjoux 7750 based Breitling watch
Which gets me to wondering about the market for used and / or broken Breitling watches, which takes me to Ebay where I find there are thousands of Breitlings are available (5,954 at the moment). Looking for broken ones turns up 27 listings, and most of those are just for spare parts. Well, how about watches in general? How about a million and a half? The first one on that list:


How can you sell a watch for $2.86? I suppose if they fell off the back of a truck you could do that. I just don't understand. This gets me wondering about watch factories, which leads to Wikipedia's list of Watch movement manufacturers which contains only 15 names. But look! One of them is Russian (two actually). How bizarre.


Never heard of a Russian watch. But if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. They cut themselves off from the rest of world, and they had this attitude that anything the capitalist running dogs can do, we can do better, so of course they are going to make their own watches. Ebay has 13,000 odd listings. Many are mechanical (i.e. not quartz), many are old, some are Russian in name only.

Then we find this:

Raketa has made a giant clock for a children's toy store in the Lubyanka

What?!? The KGB's Moscow prison is now a toy store? Tell me it ain't so, Boris. Actually it's in a department store on Lubyanka square in Moscow, which just so happens to be where the infamous Lubyanka is located.

Update January 2019 replaced missing video.

Hattori Clock Tower

The K. Hattori Building in 1932

I started reading William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive this evening. A couple of pages in he mentions "the shadow of the Hattori clock". Must be a pretty big clock, so I look it up. Turns out to be a rather famous landmark in Ginza. Kintarō Hattori started his watch and clock business (otherwise known as Seiko) in Ginza in 1881. Ginza is a district in Tokyo, Japan. In 1932 he built the K. Hattori building.

Tokyo PX in the K. Hattori Building

Much of Tokyo was devastated by American bomber raids during WW2, but the Hattori Clock Tower survived. After the war it became the PX (Post Exchange) for American G.I.'s.  In 1947 the building went back to being a department store.

The Wako Building Today

At some point people started calling this the Wako building, which is the name of the department store that occupies it.

King Clock

Old Town Clock of Prague

Looking for a picture of the clock tower from Neal Stephenson's Anathem, Google directed me to The Paltry Sapien. Seems like this clock might be where Neal got his idea for a clock that not only shows you the time but a dozen other bits of astronomical information as well.

Saudi Arabia & Islam Versus Communism & Communists

Kabul, Afghanistan

Saudi Arabia plans to start construction on a new mosque in Kabul.

King Faisal Mosque in Islamabad

The rest of this is from 2012. Sometimes it takes me a while to catch on. Rumor has it that it will be similar to this one that they built in Islamabad.

What does Saudi Arabia care about Afghanistan? A vacuum draws all kinds of opportunists.

Afghanistan is an ideal springboard and battleground for the spread of Saudi Sunni Wahhabism and Iranian Shiite fundamentalism throughout Central Asia; especially out towards the former Soviet breakaway nations that are hungry for any teaching necessary to fill the failed Bolshevik indoctrination vacuum; especially any form of Islam.- Khalil NOURI November 2012

Mecca, Saudi Arabia, October 16, 2013.  The Clock Tower and the Grand Mosque. AFP PHOTO/FAYEZ NURELDINE

 The new mosque will be big, but it cannot hold a candle to the Saudi clock tower in Mecca.

Moderate Moslems, i.e. Westernized or civilized Moslems, need to start differentiating themselves from the terrorist Moslems. As long as both groups are claiming to be Moslems (or is it Muslims? I can never keep the politically correct lingo straight.), there is going to be confusion. Some people will take the time to determine what kind of Musselman a person is. Some people would prefer to just shoot them all and let God, sorry, Allah, sort them out.

All we really need is a new name for one or both sides of the fence. You know, Democrats and Republicans are both capitalists, although you can be forgiven for forgetting that essential element. They make such a big stink about not being like the other guys. And then there are capitalists and communists, though they are getting hard to tell apart. So what can we call these two major factions of Islam? Mudders and Brudders? Mummers and Bombers? Mohammadinians and Abuhasinians? Philistines and Pharaohs? Okay, maybe these aren't too good, but you get the idea, and somehow we need to get these two sides of the fence to start using these new terms. Otherwise someone who can't tell them apart is liable to get pissed off and nuke Mecca. During the haj.

Abraj Al Bait

Stu is talking about clock towers today and he mentions this really big clock in Mecca, so I have to go look it up. It's not just a big clock, it's a friggin' huge building. I had no idea this thing even existed. That giant tower from Mission Impossible is on the left in this picture. The Sears Tower is the pale gray one just to the right. Here is a link to another size comparison chart.

Toy Clock

You may be familiar with toy clocks, those with no working parts. Just a couple of hands fastened to the center of a clock face, used by kids when constructing buildings from blocks and by teachers when trying to teach them to tell time.

These kind of toy clocks have a short coming that could be easily rectified and would go a long way towards helping kids learn to tell time. If the hour and minute hand were connected by gears then when one hand was moved the other would move in concert with it. This would establish the rule that these hands follow.

The gears would not need to be complex. A twelve to one ratio is all that would be needed. This could be accomplished with two pairs of gears. One pair with a three to one ratio, the other with a four to one ratio. Using one pair with 15 and 45 teeth would give you the three to one ratio, another pair with 12 and 48 teeth would give you the four to one ratio. Summed together they both give 60, which means they could all use the same pitch and the distance between centers of the two pairs would be the same.

Of course someone will complain that the kids will get their fingers caught between the hands. This could be alleviated by painting the minute hand on a disk and putting it behind the hour hand. With this arrangement there would be no opportunity for pinching fingers.