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.
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.
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.
Ah, but then whose time would that be? How do you keep track of what solar time was parallel to 'your' time?
Time is such a fickle thing. Every atom in the universe knows what time it is, but between the effects of gravity, the speed of light and some quantum stuff it is amazing that we can agree on this at any level at all. I spent a lot of time earlier this year getting some ultra stable clocks to run without shelling out 5 digits and it was a very interesting little detour. Eventually I settled on an old atomic clock module from a decommissioned cell tower, not quite 'miniature' but small enough (I've seen some of the newer ones and they are incredible). The thing is precise enough to show the day/night deviation in phase from DCF77 to my home a few hundred km away.
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. ;)
Just as I was getting comfortable with 10+ days of uptime, we get a neighbourhood internet downtime! It it’s back up. It was a good test of auto resume capabilities I built into my custom streaming application.
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 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.
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 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'.
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
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.
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.
https://github.com/wkjagt/apple2_pendulum_clock/blob/main/RE...
> 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.
- 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…
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.
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.
Time is such a fickle thing. Every atom in the universe knows what time it is, but between the effects of gravity, the speed of light and some quantum stuff it is amazing that we can agree on this at any level at all. I spent a lot of time earlier this year getting some ultra stable clocks to run without shelling out 5 digits and it was a very interesting little detour. Eventually I settled on an old atomic clock module from a decommissioned cell tower, not quite 'miniature' but small enough (I've seen some of the newer ones and they are incredible). The thing is precise enough to show the day/night deviation in phase from DCF77 to my home a few hundred km away.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheClockStack/streams
Time to build the failover!
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...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wismut_(company)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Republic_of_Schwarzenberg
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.
> 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.
And how they interact with your mouse cursor.
Ingenious!
Thank you Roy. You made my day! :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywD5kngMuYM — British Museum - Curious Clocks and Watches through time with Oliver Cooke