This is a functional 30-minute pendulum clock entirely from discarded materials—cardboard, zip ties, tape, a yardstick, and a paperclip escapement, built in the German Eldorado of precision watchmaking: Glashütte.
It also acts as a reference clock for GTC, a new satirical universal time standard.
An interesting project, that buries the lede to another interesting thing: abolishment of the leap second.
> In November 2022, the General Conference on Weights and Measures decided to abolish the leap second by 2035
I think the story goes that when the leap second was standardized in 1987, the wold was much less connected, there were fewer systems, and hence it was practical to keep astronomical time and civil time coordinated.
But this causes so many bugs and difficulties in practice that companies like Google don't perform leap seconds, they do leap second "smearing". But even smearing has issues, since there are multiple algorithms.
Even worse, the Earth sometimes accelerates, and there was a prospect that we might need a negative leap second, which has never been put into practice.
And as daylight savings makes everyone painfully aware, the public can tolerate even hours of misalignment between civil time and astronomical time, and even an hour adjustment.
So if we decide that we can tolerate a whole minute of skew, we need no leap minute for 50-100 years. And if we could tolerate an hour of skew, we'd not need a leap hour for millennia.
Of course, this is all can-kicking. If a leap second is difficult in practice, a leap hour in UTC (not a flip between a daylight savings and standard time zone) would be even more difficult. I feel the eventual solution would be to very slightly adjust the civil second to be shorter, so that the error begins to reduce.
What deeply confuses me is why we don’t just:
- always use atomic time
- adjust civil timezones as needed to match astronomical time well enough
Somehow, I don’t see most political and contingent timezones lasting long enough to shift by an hour…
That's an interesting idea, but it could be argued that this assumes that all of the world's timezones will agree to observe the same set of leap seconds as they currently do.
Otherwise, it shifts timezones from being 15 minute granularity to 1 second granularity. Not technically impossible, but will definitely make cross-boarder meetings interesting once the discrepancy becomes large enough. I feel the 15 and 30 minute timezones are already bad enough.
Leapseconds don't track solar time particularly well-- they track a 'mean time' (because there are large periodic variations!) which you can't even directly observe-- across the year the span is about 30 minutes.
If you have an application that needs a precise solar/astronomical time, you need to back out the leap seconds and then apply a more accurate correction already.
Because of this, I think it would be completely reasonable to just move timezones by 1 hour once the adjustment would be an improvement in accuracy--- which I seem to recall can be estimated to take about 4500 years. The adjustment is already compatible with existing software, and infrequent planned changes of this sort already happen for political reasons.
It won't hurt most usages, it will greatly help computer and recordkeeping usage, and precise solar/astronomical time will also be derisked due to fewer snafus with backing out leapsecond or incorrectly applying them.
The issue will become more critical as we deploy more timing sensitive distributed systems, and especially a low cost atomic timekeeping improves.
It seems likely me that some optical clock designed could eventually be miniaturized and give e.g. 1 second per 32 years drift performance (1ppb-- which is what commercially available miniature atomic clocks can already do) in an affordable and power efficient device. Then you could have correction/communication-free time to 'conventional precision'. But if an unpredictable feed of leap seconds is required you can never have that.
Because then one day you wake up early in the morning to find the noonday sun staring at you. It will take a while though. On second [heh] thought, you might not wake up. But some distant relative would.
For those who like long form journalism and want to know more about watch collecting and Glasshütte: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/confessions-of...
Nomos is far and away my favorite marque.
As an aside, there is a fascinating lineage betewen mining silver and the birth of the Dollar in this region[0], to the establishment of precision horology[1], and thus luxury timepieces.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_Mountains
[1]https://nomos-glashuette.com/en/watchmaking/watchmaking-trad...
It's also the region where the Russians mined the first Uranium for their a-bombs [0], and where curiously a small triangle of land was neither occupied by the Russians nor the Yanks after WW2 [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wismut_(company)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Republic_of_Schwarzenberg
There is also a museum there which is well worth visiting.
Speaking of clocks, recently we have started streaming live clocks on Youtube. There could be 100s of way of showing beautifull clocks on screen. This one is mine. Coding for fun! A bandwidth hog to be honest. ;)
https://www.youtube.com/@TheClockStack/streams
This is like the perfect clock demo opposite of the classic Bartosz Ciechandowski blog post on mechanical clock movements: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ (I love both, just opposite in the color vs dryness, jank vs precision, "build first, principles later" approach).
As art projects go, this one has a lot of charm for me. Plenty of room for allegories (although apparently not the paperclips, haha). Timekeeping in general is a subject with depth across many domains-- particularly in software as we all know. So many different ways to do the 'same thing'.
This is a really cool idea.
Oh so GTC isn't GMT mixed with UTC, it's just whatever time it is on the trash clock
This is really cool. Thanks for explaining this process so well.
Note the paperclips in the margins of the page, as you scroll to the bottom.
And how they interact with your mouse cursor.
Ingenious!
Thank you Roy. You made my day! :)
Some more cool clocks, including gravity based clocks (not hourglasses):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywD5kngMuYM — British Museum - Curious Clocks and Watches through time with Oliver Cooke
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A good analogy for German engineering.
I know, right. A real showcase of ingenuity, creativity, resourcefulness, precision, and technical excellence, just the type of thing I come to HN hoping to see.
Europe is a country with great potential.
There are credible claims that things have been invented and developed there, and some still are.