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Reminds me of some pendulum clock fun I had making a clock for the Apple 2 that used my grandparent's old clock and an inductive proximity sensor as an oscillator.
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.
Google started smearing leap seconds over a day around 2011 because nobody trusted kernels to get it right. Then the 2012 leap second took down Reddit and a pile of Java shops anyway. Just let UTC drift from UT1. Nobody's sundial is that precise.
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).
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. ;)
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.
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].
I'm a Glashütte Original fan boy. My daily driver is a SeaQ Pano. I am currently waffling between a Senator Excellence Panorama Date Moon Phase and a PanoMaticLunar both in a silver dial. I tried both on wrist a couple of weeks ago at Teddy Baldassarre's boutique while in the Cleveland area visiting my wife's family. Loved both of them on wrist. Need to decide soon so I have the watch to take on a trip we have planned for November.
Edit: I forgot to mention that we have a NOMOS in the family. I gave my daughter a deep pink NOMOS Club Campus when she graduated high school.
I am fascinated by this clock. While synthesizers are themselves complex clocks that manifest in air -- I love them and I design them myself -- I find any music, even the enjoyable synth music chosen here, to dramatically distract from the clock. I want to hear the mundane sounds of your device, not some fantasy. A much better aesthetic would be to use ASMR techniques and amplify the sounds the clock actually makes. Let us celebrate your clock. We don't need to fantasize that it is something other than what it is.
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'.
I think he has slightly misunderstood, or at least misstated, the physics:
> a pendulum oscillates is only determined by its length (and the strength of gravity), while the weight at the end of the pendulum’s rod (which clockmakers call a bob) doesn’t really matter.
This not correct. The period is determined by the distance from the fulcrum to the centre of mass. The position of the bob does matter. On my grandfather clock there is a small screw that adjusts the position of the bob and hence the length of the pendulum so that you can regulate the clock.
You are correct. With "length of the pendulum" I meant the distance between fulcrum and center of gravity. Maybe I haven't written that clear enough in my text.
That makes sense, and in practice it's what you tune anyway. When we built mechanical stuff from scrap, nobody calculated the center of gravity. You slid the weight up or down with a clock beside you until the beat matched. Fine adjustment beats the math.
My interpretation was that the actual mass of the bob doesn’t contribute to the period of the pendulum. I suppose it could shift the centre of mass somewhat relative to the mass of the rod?
As far as I know, that's right for a physical pendulum: the period depends on moment of inertia over mass times center-of-mass distance. Bob mass cancels only in the ideal point-mass case. With a heavy bob and light rod, the correction is tiny, so the claim is nearly true.
If the pendulum bar has non-zero mass increasing the mass of the bob while keeping its centre of mass at the same location on the pendulum will move the centre of mass of the combination of the two parts down and increase the period. This is a small effect because the pendulum rod is very much lighter than the bob.
The pendulum in the clock colloquially called Big Ben is regulated by adding or subtracting from a stack British pre-decimalisation one penny coins. However in this case they are placed at the top of the bob not at its centre of mass so adding a penny shortens the pendulum by moving the centre of mass of the bob up
A fun little easter egg - I had read it earlier on my iPad, so didn't notice the mouse interaction. I love it, reminds me of acko.net and how each page would have a unique little animated feature to play with.
I don't know. Was just referring to "While working on this clock, I also invented a new time scale: GTC. It blends the concepts of GMT and UTC" But I might not be getting something in https://niklasroy.com/gtc/#gtc
Great, now it drifts. A 30-minute pendulum with no NTP and no way to resync except a human walking over. I've run fleets with better clocks than that and still got paged for skew. Nobody's monitoring this one.
I disagree that this is the opposite of a good mechanical clock explainer. A trash clock hides the escapement under junk, so you actually learn less about how timekeeping works. Ciechanowski shows every part's job. This is more sculpture than teaching, which is fine, just a different thing.
https://github.com/wkjagt/apple2_pendulum_clock/blob/main/RE...