Collaborate Disseminate
People are obsessed with the time and the weather. We’ve talked about the weather since we were all cave dwellers hunting with spears. But the time is a different matter. …read more Continue reading Historical Hackers: Ctesibius Tells Time
The funny thing about clocks is that the more intriguing they are to look at, the more precious time is wasted. This steampunk clepsydra is no exception. A clepsydra, or water thief clock is an ancient design that takes many forms. Any clock that uses the inflow or outflow of …read more
Continue reading Steampunk Water Thief Clock Steals Attention, Too
We recently went through our twice yearly period of communal venting called adjusting for daylight saving time (DST), or British Summer Time (BST) as it’s called in the UK. But why are we changing the time? Seriously, who caused all this? Does it do any good? Do we still need it? And what can we do about it? As it turns out, most of us want it, as you’ll see below.
It might help you to know that we have it easy, or at least programmers do. In ancient Roman times, rather than subtract or …read more
There are few things to which we pay as much attention as the passage of time. We don’t want to be late for work, or a date. Even more importantly, we don’t want to age and die. Good time keeping is an all important human activity, and we started to worry about it as soon as we abandoned our hunter-gatherer lifestyle and agriculture and commerce emerged.
Measuring time needs two things: a repetitive process to mark equal increments of time, and a way of tracking and displaying the result. The first timekeeping devices relied of course on the movement of …read more
Continue reading The Little Mechanism That Made Precise Time-keeping Possible
