Slashdot Mirror
A Clock That Runs for 10,000 Years
Justin Blanton writes "Discover magazine is running an article about a clock designed to run accurately for 10,000 years. It's essentially a "future-proof" clock that blurs the line between art and functionality through advanced engineering. From the article: 'Everything about this clock is deeply unusual. For example, while nearly every mechanical clock made in the last millennium consists of a series of propelled gears, this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days. Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years. Unlike any other clock, this one is being constructed to keep track of leap centuries, the orbits of the six innermost planets in our solar system, even the ultraslow wobbles of Earth's axis.'"
It only lasted 2000 years.
--
Jesus.
*sets alarm to wake himself up in 10,000 years*
which is totally what she said
Does it come in wristwatch models also? :)
Great, So when humans are all dead and long gone, Aliens will land on Earth and know to the trillionth of the second what time it is on Earth.
How will we know it is keeping accurate time if nothing else is as accurate to check it against?
Not something for the wrist. But it looks cool. Perhaps he watched The Dark Crystal one too many times though....
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
I suppose this is a moot point, but there's always the human factor. Different countries' changing stances on daylight savings time, scientists deciding to eliminate a second here or there to gain a minute here or there, etc.
We've known about this since when? Oh yeah, since 1996. Yawn...
Does it have a alarm for when a site comes back online after slashdotting?
"Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years"
Now i can get rid of my solar clock on my lawn
Perhaps someone could tell me:
Whilst I appreciate that accurate clocks are important for some tasks, when is enough enough? Seriously, what is a task that the current atomic clocks aren't up to?
This is just a bunch of marketing fru-fru. The last 10,000-year clock I bought only lasted 6,738 years (give or take a month). Even if you take into account my time travel, I still should have gotten a good 8,500 years out of it, at least.
The real question is support. Will the manufacturer still be around in 3,000 years when you need to replace the little rubber feet? Are vendors and repair centers going to stock replacement parts? How much does an extended warranty cost?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
The clock looks like ThinkGeek could sell quite a lot of them, it may be a little on the expensive side. A lot of high-tech mechanic combined with a polished look so that any other clock looks childish.
b 42f18bb66f3c291/index.html
The article is rather slow to get already so use mirrodot instead: http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/608e5b4931282247
No, it was most probably for monitoring the decay of disposable nappies in landfill sites.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
For every variable you introduce, the liklihood of defects rises fivefold.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
In other news, scientists around the world have started collected schematics and writings made by a Renaissance-era scientist name Rambaldi.
I wonder how accurate this mechanical clock is when it is subjected to unusual g-forces.
It sounds nice, but is it Y2K compatible?
The natives of Cairo stripped the pure white polished casing stones from the great pyramid to build a large number of building in their city. Nothing against the need for public housing, but it is a shame. There are plenty of other examples as well.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Isn't the whole concept of time a human-centered activity, meaning that concepts relating to time change over time? The clock might be able to tick off the seconds over 10,000 years, but will it be able to reset itself when the switch date of Daylight Savings Time (in the US) changes in a year or so? What about future changes of that sort? TFA is actually pretty fascinating but it sounds like the inventor paid much more attention to engineering problems than to human factors relating to the concept of time.
The article i slashdotted, but if it's the clock I am thinking of, they made it deliberately so it requires regular winding (not sure how often). That is, it's not a "set it and forget it" type thing.
w
.. the should account for that. I suppose if someone finds the clock after 10,000 years they'll be able to crank it up .. that should be awesome to do. It should be placed in a hollow large chamber of obvious intelligent design, so that if the place is ever buried .. a future archaeologist will be able to detect it and recognize that it's not a natural cavity etc. Also I hope we're around and it's not the descendant of a mutant penguin who ends up cranking it back up rather than a human.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_No
the article seems slashdotted.
Seems a bit silly to me for them to require that, given that we as a species get bored of things
Anyone remember how "some" people get/got all worked up about the Mayan Calendar? How it "ends" at, oh I don't remember exactly, but it was supposed to end sometime around 2005 or 2006 I believe...
So...
Who's to say that the Mayan Calendar creators simply didn't do the SAME thing these people did? That is to make a Clock/Calendar which is accurate for 'n' number of years into the future.
There is NOTHING cosmic, or "End-of-the-world-doom-and-gloom" about the Mayan calendar either... It was probably something as simple as some Mayan's decided to make their Calendar last for a LONG DAMN TIME!!!
It is probably just THAT Simple!
Just a thought.
I am surprised by the questions/comments regarding practicality. Whatever happened to doing something neat simply because "you could"?
...both interiorlly, and exteriorlly.
Everything about this clock is deeply unusual.
I wouldn't say that. The idea of charging people extra for timepieces with functionality they'll never use is quite common. How else do you explain so many watches that can withstand water to a depth of > 1 metre?
Which lasts 10,000 years.
A server which last 10,000 Milliseconds .
A story about an atomic clock being 9 years out of date has a certain poetry to it .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I'm not usually one to complain about the age of articles on Slashdot, but I first read about the Long Now project in a Wired cover story published in 1998. Perhaps the article submitter didn't know about it until now, but this is far from a new project.
Is that a new product from Google? GForces
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
...this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days.
Unfortunately, these computers suffer from the dreaded Y12K Bug.
Damn power cord.
I wonder if it will convert stupid American acronyms for time-zones like EST that's nobodies ever heard of to the more sensible GMT-5 (or UTC) like the rest of the world use.
How many man years does that waste for the rest of the planet doing the conversion.
This is just too good to pass up so I won't!
Did they plan for the Y10K bug?
Built in 1996... must run Windows 95... must have been rebooted too many times to count already.
Current computer uptime records are very sub 100 years.
Stonehenge was designed for the same thing and it is only 5000 years old.
etc...
etc...
etc...
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
.. and when it suffers a power loss it will flash
12:00:00.0000
I'd like
Clock radios haven't changed at all since I first got one when I was about 5! Someone out there must be able to package up a glorified palm pilot with some big buttons and red led's and make a killing. These days you could put 802.11 in it and get weather/traffic reports on a led ticker
Sure there many old ones about that still work without needing there battery changing or winding up ;).
Yes, we could spend all day talking about the technicalities of the clock, the politicization of human calendars, and what the odds are of the thing not getting blown up by someone who thinks that only Allah Knows What Time It Is, etc... but the whole point of the project is cultural/philoshopical. It (as the finished project is conceived) is a conversation piece designed to make observers actually think past what they're going to have for lunch, and whether or not Battlestar Galactica is a re-run or not tonight.
By checking the clock to see what time it is, in the context of a 10,000-year swath of time (still a geological/evolutionary blink of an eye), one is at least encouraged to keep that larger context in mind. It's intended to dimish the long-term weight of petty squabbles, perhaps remind people that 10,000 years back we were in an ice age, that sort of thing. Might even make you think about your 401k contribution (or forget about it!).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
. . . and it will only cost as much as the gross national budget for the next 10,001 years, too!
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
...what it said
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
500 years ago amirica was discoved (from the spanjard view), look what is acutally left of those ships.
2000 years ago the roman empire ended. Most what left of is are some ruins and some idea's
5000 years the piramids were build, look what is left of that. They are eroded. We have a vague clue of their purpose. (storing mummmies, but mummies were never found in it?)
10000 years ago? Star-gate might be right about it, maybe man did not exist in it's current form.
You might enineer it well enough to measure a wobble of the earth, but to actually package it so it can survive 10.000 years and still have a meaning is not only an engineering feat, it must be an antropology feat as well, to make people long after this understand what it is and leave it in pieces.
My employer will probably implement this as a timeclock...
I don't know the price but since their wristwatches start at around USD$8,000 and go up to over $200k, I suspect you could buy a very nice car for the price. Patek make rolex look like cheap crap (which is mostly true).
The references in other comments to atomic clocks miss the point entirely. Atomic clocks are about precision and accuracy. This clock is concerned with accuracy, but only at long scales. A mechanism to re-set to local noon, as described in the article, is plenty to catch the daily drift and would probably compensate for running fast/slow for many days if the sky were cloudy. For the kind of astronomical time this clock is concerned with, being a few seconds behind or ahead is irrelevant.
Lunchtime doubly so
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
These guys are geniuses, the kind you see in movies. Danny Hillis himself thought up the idea of parallel processing for his doctaral thesis while he was a grad student. They don't specialize in any fields, they apply their creativity to R&Ds in almost any field, be it medical, defence or engineering.
They are the ones who created that voicebox which replies incomprehensible snippets of your voice to prevent eavesdropping, a human-size Dino robot walking around Hong Kong Disneyland that can mingle with the tourist without any danger because it is able to shift its weight such that if its foot encounters an eggshell, it can back off without breaking it. (that's in the middle of a step) and the company also created a tabletop display that can show a 3D view of any location on earth by using thousands of pins to replicate the actual reliefs.
As you rightly point out, it just takes one group of people to trash it, hey in the UK lots of people got upset about the Taleban blowing up the Buddha statues in Afghanistan, but then remembered we also destroyed most of our own religious heritage through a series of political
Star axis is a huge sculpture in new mexico that measures the woble of the earth's axis. The artist, Charles Ross, is associated w/ the long now foundation that did the clock. http://epoch.longnow.org/share/longnow/landart/Sta rAxis.JPG
http://www.kunstraum-innsbruck.at/foto/landart/pic 06g.jpg
Website w/ geometric explanations:
http://www.staraxis.org/index0.html
Geeze, I gotta get my eyes checked. I could have sworn that said "disposable nipples"...
Some a-hole will lodge a rock in its gears within the first 6 months.
This clock is designed to be more of a monument than a useful timepiece - something that will help people understand their short time on earth, versus a science instrument.
However the engineering effort to make this clock as accurate and as long-lasting as promised is truly impressive. Few things built today are designed to last that long (exception: perhaps long-term nuclear waste storage?) The materials : stone, steel, tungsten - and the size of the parts, and the mechanics of the thing that allows for 10,000 years of wear, along with easy maintenance - man, these are not things that even your top-notch mechanical engineer does.
Interestingly enough, this guy is working on a long term clock, while others can't even get little clocks to work right. Some public clocks can be grossly imprecise. It's funny how someone running a time service can't get their own time right. Hopefully the telcos will hook up their time services to this clock - or NTP services. Whichever is easier.
From TFA:
``As an MIT undergrad in 1975, Hillis and his friends built a binary computer out of 10,000 Tinkertoy pieces. It could beat all comers at tic-tac-toe.''
Okay, I _must_ know this secret --- I've taught my kids to play, and while I can still beat my son (age 5), my daughter and I _always_ wind up with a tie. I even saw a movie once where this nifty supercomputer called Joshua couldn't win a game....
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Whenever someone decides to add another leap day (every 400 years or something) or take one out (every ~2000)
or when a disaster has a big enough impact to make the earth wobble (tsunami 2004 anyone?)
How do you upgrade your watch?
TODO: 753) write sig.
It's almost a footnote in TFA, but it seems like the materials questions pose the greatest obsticles here. The clock is largely mechanical in it's action. So this would involve building a mechanical system that needs to run smoothly (read: without stiction ANYWHERE in the main stack) for 10,000 years. Obviously, anything that will corrode is probably not the best idea. Not only that, but the parts need NOT to bend under their own weight in 10,000 years--no way to seal out gravity. Finally, since there are a lot of moving pieces, this needs somehow to be lubricated in such a way that 10,000 years of dust and grit can't clog the mechanism. Even if you seal the mechanism in some kind of dustproof inert gas chamber, now you've got to ensure your seal holds for 10,000 years...
This is an interesting concept, but it seems like there's a LOT of cleverness that needs to come out in the choice of materials if this is going to go from something that in theory could possibly run for 10,000 years to something that we'd actually EXPECT to have run for 10,000 years.
If so, how many years do I get to sleep when I hit the snooze bar?
My work here is dung.
I've already made one of these. If you don't believe me, you're more than welcome to come back in 500 years to check it. Na nana boo boo
Is this more precise than a Cesium atomic clock? When it comes down to it, all the leap calculations, etc. are programmatic and are not related to super-accurate timekeeping. What you really want is a really stable timing signal, which is pretty much what you get out of a Cesium atomic clock.
I don't know if this is done in the civilian industry, but back in my military satellite communication days, we used to keep no less than two Cesium clocks on site at all time. These produced insanely accurate 10 MHZ and 1 Pulse per second signals which were then distributed to all our other electronics equipment in-house. All our up/down converters, multiplexers, modems, etc. relied on this centralized clock. If one of the clocks got out of sync we were not even allowed to fix it ourselves, instead these were shipped over to the US Naval Observatory, which was in charge of dealing with these.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
... can I clip it to my wang?
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
This will be good...when the apes inherit the earth, at least they'll know the correct date and time.
I guess that clocks are literally "future proof" since they can only tell the time today, right now. Bit of a limitation really.
Maybe some billionaire will end up with it. Good luck to the makers! But I suspect the builders of Stonehenge might have scoffed a little. Their clock is still going and it has no moving parts.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
As an MIT undergrad in 1975, Hillis and his friends built a binary computer out of 10,000 Tinkertoy pieces. It could beat all comers at tic-tac-toe.
Damn, think it could win a thermo-nuclear war against itself?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
While the clock's designed to theoretically keep 10,000 years worth of time accurately, will it actually last that long? If the large version could be engineered well enough to still be running in 10,000 years time with minimal maintanance, it would be an excellent momument to future generations.
In 10,000 years time there will probably be little else left of our era, and something like this could make the difference between this period being known for war and polution or being known for amazing increases in technology and engineering.
Just imagine- One day this thing could be placed amongst the statue of liberty and the pyramids of giza as wonders of the ancient world!
What's needed is some thoughtful design.
Alarm clocks are a prime example of a product in which the inmates are running the asylum. Each new half-baked feature clock makers add gets appended in the clunkiest possible way. These things aren't designed around the user, they're made according to the specs of the parts.
The gold standard for our new design will be: I must be able to operate the clock's basic features when I wake up in the morning, blurry-headed and without my contacts in. This basic problem -- that they're used by sleepy people -- seems to have escaped current makers of alarm clocks.
None of this has anything to do with "long time" though, not any more than with atomic clocks. (One of the obvious, obvious features of a decent alarm clock being that it'll synch with the atomic clocks and get back on track after a power outage or whatever...)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
For some reason you have to press 'Execute' on an attached terminal every 108 minutes or... something catasrophic will happen.
Sounds very Lost ish.
Many people are completely uninterested. They think it's nonsense, a waste of time
i'm sure he could figure out exactly how much time he wasted..
if you want people to think you know what you are talking about, just put ".com" at the end of everything you say.com
You obviously didn't read the arcticle. In the event of societal collapse the creator wants it to be serviceable with Bronze Age technology. An LCD display is most decidedly *not* Bronze Age tech.
Try again, better luck next time.
Do you really think an LCD display will last 10000 years? BTW, it would go against the project goals (which is not to impress future visitors). As the article states, the clock shall be understandable without taking it apart.
The point is not a technology demonstration. The point is to alter the thinking of the people about long time spans.
Again, the project isn't about teaching future people about our knowledge, it's about teaching current people to think long term. However, I could imagine that the star movement would be a great tool for that. Assuming those 10.3 arcseconds per year will not change in the future (and neither the direction), in 10000 years it will have moved about 28.6 degrees. This is indeed a quite visible difference. Of course, if the clock should track the movements of the stars as well, its price might grow from exorbitant to unaffordable
I bet that in 10000 years any HD-DVD produced today will be completely unreadable.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
A clock that is capable of recording the exact time in the future when I eventually get laid!! Thank you science.
I remember reading somewhere that the Earth flips its magnetic polls every 100,000 years or so. The article also said we were close to a switch relativly, within 10,000 years of one. If that is true then how can this clock be acurate at that time? Wouldn't a flip in the magnetic polls change the wobble of the earth a bit?
On top of all that how close to thier magnetic switch are the other planets it is keeping track of?
Most what left of is are some ruins and some idea's
I suppose if you want to include the Latin alphabet and language, and the books that formed the cornerstone of Western civilization until the Renaissance, with deep enough cultural resonance that pretty much every eastern European nation used a mangled form (Kaizer, Czar) of Caesar to describe their rulers, in the set of "some ideas", then you might be right. What would count as the Romans leaving their mark? A centurion on every street corner?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Is it George-Bush-meddling-with-daylight-saving-time proof?
Ok, so are you going to finance the design and manufacture of LCDs and DVDs that last more than 20 years? That could cost billions of dollars, and I think it's out of the realm of this project.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
One of his clocks was made of wood and he used wood that produced a natural lubricant so it needs no maintenance at all. It is STILL running.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
And they don't have a power source either.
And obviously even if it gets "designed", there's no way to actually test it. There will be functions that are only exercised every 4,000 years, so those parts will be mighty hard to test under realistic conditions. How do you design a mechanical flip-flop that has to sit still for 4,000 years, then flip?
And they apparently don't have a good time reference! No atomic clock, as they tend to run out of cesium atoms after a few years. It's apparently meant to be locked to the Sun, but that's not a particularly *good* clock. Even now we have to occasionally add a leap-second to keep roughly in sync with the Sun. And locking to the Sun is problematical, as the Earths' axis precesses a bit, changing local noon on a roughly 18,000 year cycle.
So not to put too fine a point on it, should we really be impressed by a very sketchy design, and very partial prototype, for a useless, marketless, and probably unbuildable gadget that won't tell time all that well anyway?
The real question is support. Will the manufacturer still be around in 3,000 years when you need to replace the little rubber feet? Are vendors and repair centers going to stock replacement parts? How much does an extended warranty cost?
This is so ontopic! This is the one overshadowing design criterion. It should be possible to repair with whatever technology is available in 10000 years. And you can't rely on manuals, since you don't even know what languages there will be 10000 years down the road.
...and while everyone talks about slowing down, one clever soul is going to stop. Stop time, that is. For good. Going against everything known (and nine-tenths of everything that remains unknown), a young horologist has been commissioned to build the world's first truly accurate clock. It falls to History Monk Lu-Tze and his apprentice Lobsang Ludd to find the timepiece and stop it before it starts. For if the Perfect Clock starts ticking, Time - as we know it - will stop. And then the trouble will really begin...
- Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
Last post!
Although the work of Daniel Hillis and his team is extremely interesting, much more impressive is the tale and contribution of English clock designer John Harrison.
I'm finding this hard to believe.
Lets see what math has to say about this.
10000 years between failures or a failure every 10000 years.
Lets say there are 100 critical parts that make up this clock.
That means each part needs to have an average operational lifespan of million years.
This assumes that there is no redundancy incorperated into the system, and there may be, but it's not obvious from the pictures.
I'm also wondering how this clock is powered. If it's purely mechanically powered, then 10,000 years may be possible. I doubt any electrical system can last that long without some serious over engineering (electrolytics dry out, motor bushes wear, wire insulation degrades, silicon dopants migrate).
It'll work great until Congress changes Daylight Savings Time yet again...
I may have missed it when reading the article, but what drives this super clock? If its mechanical, I will assume that its going to rely on some sort of kinetic/potential energy transition, but I don't see a pendulum or a power source, nor can I think of one that will last 10,000 years.
How much do you want to bet that when you loose power, the damn thing still flashes 12:00 like every cheap VCR on the planet?
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
This idea was started over a decade ago by technologist Danny Hillis. Though they have a design and site, its been really slow getting off the ground.
So slap a foolproof alarm device with language-agnostic hieroglyphics on there and you can finally tell the Beings of the Distant Future whether or not it is safe to enter the area around Yucca Mountain.
[
I have to wonder if this has anything to do with the the Long Now Foundation.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Things that are missing from existing IP-enabled devices:
Things that are missing from alarm clocks:
Other niceties:
This is old, from 1996. Obviously. Yet, the fact that Slashdot and Discover magazine are just now running a few articles, doesn't that show that the clock is doing its job?
Yes, it does have to keep accurate time -- that's one for the engineers. However, there is a psychological factor involved with the whole event. Even now we see that we're interested in this project, but it wasn't a very recent event. I doubt many people were interested in '96, yet there seems to be a larger "user base" so to speak. We don't actually care right now what time it says it is because we have kept clocks, yet we are still interested in the theatrics.
Seems to be working to me.
Instead of going all googly-eyed over the clock, how about you go off and maintain/increase productivity? The clock is meant to force(?) people to think in terms of the "long now". Not just you, your life, or your children's lives, but the future (about 10,000 years according to the Long Now Foundation).
Local noon is an easy time to measure. When the sun is due south, it's local noon. Due south is halfway between local sunrise and local sunset. If the clock were to drift, it would be saying something like "it's two oclock" whereas the sun would be telling you it was local noon so you'd know the clock was wrong. The clock is designed to reset itself based on the position of the sun using a bimetallic strip so unless it breaks completely, it should keep time.
The bigger problem to my eyes is they're planning on tucking it hell and gone inside a mountain so no one will steal or vandalize it. For a monument that is intended as a statement of hope for the future, that strikes me as counter productive. "Umm, we built this thing for you kids whom we've never met but we figure you're not trustworthy enough to let you know where it is."
The architects in the middle ages trusted their offspring to finish and maintain the cathedrals that the architects laid the foundations for. Seems that turned out ok - most of the cathedrals are still here and don't show signs of being stolen or vandalized. Even the Germans had the good sense to leave Paris alone during both wars and they're the original Vandals.
Put it in the desert to keep it free from humidity but don't go and hide the damn thing. Kind of defeats the idea.
Untill the darn metric time standard is ratified...
Hmm, so which one is powering it? I would be more interested in the design of the 10,000 year power supply than the clock.
Oh well, what the hell...
but I wouldn't like to try wearing it on my wrist.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Every time I hear about a mechanical / atomic clock to be supremely accurate, I have to wonder, what about daylight savings time? what about leap years? leap seconds?
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05210/545823.stm
http://www.leaphour.com/
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/leap/
unless either:
1) The world (not just the US) completely and finally breaks ther link between astronomical events and time, or
2) Atomic clocks are programmed to comprehend astronomical events such as sunrise / sunset, variances in the length in solar years, and others,
Then the next finder of this wonder may be as lost as to its real function and meaning as we are about stonehinge.
One may assume that civilization constantly marches forward technologically, but that one must explain why the ancient Romans had flush toilets when the American settlers did not.
It'll never survive the Bush administration!
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
This article is amazing. It really moved me. The concepts and level that the people involved in this are thinking on really makes a person stop to consider how thoughtless we are today to our culture and the impact that we have on not only ourselves and the rest of the world in the here and now, but how such an idea can be a profound testiment to the achievements of the human race for generations long after we're gone.
I see so many jokes, rants, and condemnations from people responding to this here on Slashdot, and it becomes immediately clear that these people have not read the article, and if they have, are completely shallow and selfish people.
There is so much meaning and thought that has gone into this that it's unspeakable to even consider anything but full support for this project. I want my place in time to have a reflection to civilizations thousands of years from now. The human race in the past no doubt realized the significance of speaking to future generations... why are we so thoughtless?
A community-oriented lyrics site
This watch shows the time, the day, the date, the year and the altitude. It is so hard to read because one hand is missing and you can't tell if it's the little one or the big one. That's why today is Saturday the 94th of February.... 1610, B.C. Last Wednesday was Easter Sunday on this watch and after dinner my neighbor came over and distributed Christmas gifts..... because he also has one of these watches.
http://www.CelloFourteGroupie.net
In 10 thousand years, do you think an LCD will be any more impressive than a mechanical dial? The 40-year difference in tech in insignificant compared to the projected life cycle of this thing. The whole point is to make people realize the vastness of time.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
That John Titor will need for time travel. :)
daylight savings time?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
(Genius)+(Wealth)+(Too Little To Do) = CLOCK THAT WILL RUN FOR 10,000 YEARS! W00T!
Alternative: place stick in vertically in the ground in the dark.*
When you can see the shadow = morning
When the shadow is the shortest during the day = noon
When you can't see the shadow anymore = sunset
Interpolate other times as needed.
Bonus weather detection capability: if the stick is wet, it's probably raining. If the stick has fallen over, it's windy. If the stick is moving, earthquake or landslide. If you can't see the stick, fog or heavy snow.
* if you think I'm being facetious, well, I am. But IIRC from TFA in Wired, his superclock has a 'precisely' angled lens that uses solar heating to heat a metal strip that acts as a correction mechanism...i.e. it's correcting for local noon daily, ala a frikken stick in the ground.
-Styopa
does it predict massive earth tilting earthquakes, or violent magnetic polar shifts, or acts of God? if not, i like skagen watches. they're so flat!
It is, of course, the Torah!
I used to work with Hillis when I was at Walt Disney Imagineering, R&D down in Glendale. And I mentioned to him that his 10,000 year clock sounded religious in nature...you needed a cult around it to maintain it with regular ceremonies, etc. Of course, I mentioned the fact that the Jews already had one that has successfully run ever since Moses received the Torah at Mt. Sinai, several thousand years ago. Hillis just stared at me like I wasn't making sense.
Best Buy can have you arrested
But can it predict future revolutions?
(Today is Octidi, le 38 Vendémiaire, Année 214 de la République, to you monarchist imperialist bastards!)
- undoware.ca
Does it take into account the whims of the U.S. Congress on Daylight time?
http://seminars.longnow.org/
In the Hall of Records. But set it like it started at July 4 1776.
It's called "the sun."
I think it's got another 5 billion or so years left on it, too.
What?
Readers of Wired Magazine (both of them!) have known about this since 1995. Go to this page and scroll down to "The Millennium Clock/An essay by Danny Hillis from 01995" They were already Y10K compliant ten years ago!
http://www.longnow.org/projects/clock/
Tag lost or not installed.
I would have thought that Hillis would have easily understood a massively parallel distributed implementation of a clock, even if it is completely virtualized.
It's about time!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
THE EARTH! Oh wait...
Like say a 9.6 earthquake, or a comet hitting earth... ...
...
This changes the wobble of earth and so the time is in error after all
I want my refund
kR.\'
I stumbled across this project 5 years ago & was immediately in love. The scope of the project is amazing, the engineering that went into some of the pieces is incredible, and the final product (the first prototype) was gorgeous. I read everything I could about it & even had it as my wallpaper for a while. If you like mechanical devices, take some time to look at this project - it's well worth it!
i mages/general-EqOfTimeDtl1_00Lo.jpg
Currently, you can find the project's web page at http://www.longnow.org/projects/clock/
The mechanical computer, the solar synchronizer, and the power mechanism are all very cool pieces of engineering. However, the most fascinating part of the entire clock is the "Equation of Time Cam". A bit more information about the cam follows.
The proposed clock not only keeps accurate solar time (it resets itself every day at noon via the solar synchronizer), it also keeps accurate "clock time". How it does this is pretty amazing:
In general, when the sun reaches its highest point ("solar noon"), you can look at your watch & find that it's not really noon. On any given day, the variation between "solar noon" & "clock noon" is +/- 15 minutes. Of course, this variation chanages through out the year, following a well defined curve known as the "equation of time" (http://www.sundials.co.uk/equation.htm) (it looks like a 5th order polynomial equation).
So, when the mechanical clock resets itself at "solar noon", it's needs to account for this variation to determine "clock noon". One way to do this is to make a disc that is not perfectly round; it has a wider diameter at portions & a narrower diameter at other parts (something like a cross between a circle & an ameoba). This "disc" makes one revolution per year, and the variations in its diameter represent the difference between "solar noon" & "clock noon". So, at "solar noon", the clock resets itself & uses a feeler gauge on the disc to figure out how much variation to add or subtract to display "clock noon". So, assuming you have a sunny day every once & a while, you have a clock that will always have accurate clock time. Ingenious!
There's a problem, though: each year, the equation of time changes slightly. So, in order to keep accurate clock time for 10,000 years, you need 10,000 of these discs, each representing the distinct equation of time for each year. The Long Now foundation solves this problem by making an "Equation of Time Cam" - a continous stack of these cylinders. In my mind it is a thing of beauty - engineering at its best - well thought out and so simple. Here's a picture of the cam - it's the cylinder that looks like it melted a bit:
http://www.longnow.org/projects/clock/prototype1/
The Long Now's explanation can be found here (complete with Cad drawings!):
http://emsh.calarts.edu/~mathart/Clock_Cam.html
I hope everyone enjoys this project as much as I have - Have fun!
I know a clock that's been running for 3500 years. In fact, in a week or so, we wind it with a beautiful ceremony. Millions of people around the world will participate in the winding of this clock, and similar numbers meet several times a week to read its instructions, and wind it throughout the year.
...
It is, of course, the Torah!
Hillis just stared at me like I wasn't making sense.
I'd have done the same. Maybe, like me, his religious education never covered the Jewish religion. That Wikipedia article doesn't tell me why the Torah is like a clock, nor do I know what winding ceremony you are referring to (my desk calendar lists many religious days, such as Yom Kippur and Ramadan, but there's nothing there until Halloween).
So your "of course" isn't so obvious to me, Hillis (apparently) and millions of others unschooled in your particular religion.
You've piqued my interest though, so I'd be keen to read your explanation. If it's a conventional interpretation of the Torah, perhaps you should update the Wikipedia article...
It can't keep time by a primary standard (atomic clock or something) because this standard would probably not survive 10000 years itself. The way out they took is to synchronise it mechanically to the sun every day using lirrors and bimetals. In other words: it is an advanced sundial (no troll intended), just a bit more complicated and clever.
Unfortunately I could not find info on the wear. The article mentions the avoidance of gems, precious materials etc (to avoid looting). Usually these are also the _hard_ materials that give ordinary clocks a good restatance to wear. How will they avoid that it comes to a grinding stop in 2000 years?
For further reading, here are some links:
w
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5 007805/002-9433271-9089642?v=glance
A quick write up about it: http://www.bfi.org/Trimtab/spring00/longnow.htm
A wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_No
An interview aobut it: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brand/brand_p2.ht
A Discovery Article: http://www.discover.com/issues/nov-05/cover/
A book about the clock: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/046
The last part of that sentence indeed summarizes the chief obstacle to longevity of any monument.
Incidentally, this is not the first time that such a time-scale has been deliberately studied. A while ago the U.S. Dept. of Energy actually commissioned a study into the problem of marking a long-term nuclear waste repository (WIPP in New Mexico, Yucca Mountain if it ever opens) so as to prevent unintentional intrusion and possible spread of contamination.
Physicist and SF author Gregory Benford was on the team, and his account appears as the first chapter of his book, Deep Time. The book is, it seems, out of print, but still available on Amazon. There is a slightly garbled copy of that chapter online, minus the cool illustrations of several marker concepts. Some illustrations appear in the excerpted report of the WIPP Marker Panel. Fascinating and slightly unsettling stuff.
When the remnant of humankind on Mars reverts to Imperial Reign yearkeeping in Showa 1009, what will be the use of an obsolete "perpetual" calendar that doesn't know when Grom Vlagga Day is or what miblak Eta Carinae V is in?
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Article is slashdotted, so I can't tell if this is the Clock of the Long Now, but it certainly sounds similar.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
small micro-accumulation will occur in the darndest of places. if a chamber is sealed, bugs and critters are sure to get n there, and if some mice bring in a bunch of twigs and gum up the works -- and you have insects with a few centuries of grit in the device -- does it run as smoothly? the crawlspace under my house has loads of activity from little scurrying creatures -- anything that relies on exact tolerances for anything is sure to be gummed up -- its only a mattter of time.
Maybe the machine is too complex, too expensive, too ponderous and big and pointless-- but it's such a beautifully human little thing to build that I can't help but love it. Not only that, but it's human in a way that is perhaps unique to modern times. The retrospection-- the self consciousness of a people that have discovered they are a part of *history*-- that's what I appreciate in this machine.
Have you ever wondered why we don't find time capsules from two thousand years ago with messages for the future? It, apparently, simply didn't occur to anyone that they might be able to, by leaving a durable message, communicate in a one sided way with the future. That the human race now can think "I wonder what people will think of us when we're gone... we'd better let them know what kind of folks we are so they don't get the wrong impression", is a very hopeful sign. It indicates to me an elevation of consciousness-- the kind of consideration for the future that might make it so we don't *need* to build devices explaining our society to a hypothetical post-apocalyptic people.
Maybe we can make this whole civilization thing sustainable after all. The big concern is, are there enough people like this?
Oh, I'm sorry... Slashdot, right. "Yes, but does it store phone numbers?
IIRC it was a small blurb in Scientific American a few years back (perhaps even pre-Y2K) where I first read of the LongNow Clock, and it got me interested in other long-term projects and ideas as well (which there aren't many).
There's a HUGE time capsule at Oglethorpe University called "The Crypt of Civilization". Most time capsules you may have read about are small things about the size of a shoebox meant to be opened 50 to 100 years after they are sealed. The "Crypt" was a (indoor, apparently) swimming pool (emptied of water, of course) loaded up with many artifacts and sealed in 1930, and scheduled to be opened in about 6,000 years.
Oglethorpe is also the home of The International Time Capsule Society. Notable pages on the website are Tips on Building a Time Capsule and The Nine Most Wanted Time Capsules.
As I discussed on the forum at that site, it would be interesting to couple one or more time capsules to such a clock, to have each capsule be opened at a pre-programmed time.
Disclaimer: I have no connection to Oglethorpe, just a fan of the site, and the "most prolific" contributor to the site's time capsule forum (three of the six posts).
The clock is certainly a "Next-Generation" design, bring the very first Y10K-compliant device.
Tag lost or not installed.
Wonder how he made his money so he could get lost in a cave. I didn't RTFA, but how is his different than the one built by Brand et. al.?
Ok, how about an LBD?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
During the holiday called Simchas Torah the scroll is rewound, and the process starts again. While some will dispute that this has been going in since Mt. Sinai, nobody will argue that it hasn't worked this way for at least 2100 years or so....
Best Buy can have you arrested
I've been looking for a really complex clock to put on my desk. A kit is fine too.
I just want something that's mechanically complex, has maybe some kind of ingenious escapement, and something that is not cheaply made (made of solid, heavy pieces of metal). I've searched the net high and low and I can't find anything.
I've been seriously considering getting some books on clock design and finding someone local with access to machine tools. I used to be a machinist, so if I had to fab the parts, it wouldn't be that difficult. Just time consuming.
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Since the clock is binary, getting "gummed up" wont actually slow the clock down. Even if the parts show signs of wear the binary functions will still work. They even built an auto reset function that uses sunlight to heat a piece of metal when the sun reaches noon for example.
The article also mentions finding material that will last for 10K years, maybe titanium? they havent decided yet. The functioning prototypes use stainless steel.
No sig here...
I've been a member of Bruce Sterling's Viridian Movement since before it started, which featured the Long Now's "Long Clock" project when it kicked off. I've even been to international design conferences where Sterling and Long Now people have presented, talking about the Clock. But they've obviously learned nothing from their own intriguing proposition.
How can they possibly be sure that anything they make will be readable as a "clock" 10,000 years from now? That's the biggest problem: if humans even remain on Earth after 3x our current civilization's lifetime has passed, how will they read the clocks? The Egyptian Pyramids are increasingly clearly "clocks", like Stonehenge, for telling "what time it is" in the sky, among the constellations. That revelation only appeared to one guy, about 10 years ago, and is still known only to a few interested people. We still don't know how to tell when the "alarm" goes off, beyond some basics (which could be wrong). Even Stonehenge, recognized as a clock for longer and by more people, isn't really readable. And those clocks are only maybe 5-7,000 years old, mostly millennia where humans didn't change nearly as much as we have in the past millennium, or (likely) as much as we'll change in the next century or so.
We've already built "long now" clocks, that haven't quite worked. They probably did achieve the same goals of the Long Now Foundation: giving society a way to learn to think about long periods of time with the same immediacy and importance as we think about the present moment. We should learn from the long experience in that project by solving the fundamental problem: communicating with our descendents 10,000 years from now. We can probably rely, like our ancestors, on celestial mechanics remaining readable by humans in such an (astronomically) brief time. A real Long Now Clock would merely promote human synchronization with those movements. Maybe a new stone megalith that points at decade/century/millennium markers in the sky. No moving parts, just pictures of humans reading the skies (showing the actual celestial mechanics and how the person decodes them).
Baby Boomers, like the Long Now Foundation people, always think they're the first to invent or do anything, especially if it's fun. And they're great at reinventing the mistakes of history as they ignore it. They do get people motivated to do something as if it were new and exciting, though. So the best thing that this new toy clock they're building could do would be to perish, and pronto. Then we'd get a "second chance" (puns intended) to use the clocks we've already got, and change ourselves to use them. That change would also make us better people, with a longer view of "now", the future, and our place in it.
--
make install -not war
That's interesting, and I consider myself newly educated, so thanks!
But based on your description, the Torah clock overflows to zero once a year, so it does not embody the Long Now as the 10,000 year clock intends to. In order to do so, ever Simchas Torah a counter would somehow need to incremented.
If I want to buy my own, do I have to buy all batteries in advance too?
Did anyone notice that this is a rather unique exercise in ego? I think the guy needs a dose of Buddist doctrine; everything is impermanent. Why doesn't he have some kids? Maybe that will give him the pseudo immortality he is looking for.
They probably won't use titanium. One of the requirements is that the clock not be made of anything valuable enough to make it worth tearing up the clock.
There are still intact buildings from the Roman era. I was just at the Parthanon and it didn't look like a ruin to me. Of course, it has been maintained all these years because it was used as a church.
They'd better be big mice. This thing is supposed to be somewhere in excess 60 feet tall when assembled. The unit that is about 5 feet tall appears to have pins (these are the moving parts of the clock)the thickness of a pencil. The full scale one should have pins around 3 inches in diameter. Big heavy 5 centimeter thick pins of bronze or some other long wearing, low corroding metal - which usually means heavy. Better be some darned big mice to gum those suckers up... otherwise it just gets messy with splattered bits of mouse everywhere.
BTW - bugs and mcie and such will not neccesarily get into this if it is sealed - heck, some egyptian tombs over 3,000 years old were air tight until archeaolgists opened em up. Air tight means no bugs, mice or anything bigger than an oxygen molecule.
What about Tanaka Hisashige's Mannendokei (ten-thousand year clock) displayed at this year's Expo in Aichi, Japan? And that was like, what, only a hundred years ago? 1880 called, they want their clock back. http://www.karakuri.info/master Meh.
The Maya Calendar is discussed at the Calendar FAQ Section 8 and in more detail here.
The relationship between the Maya and Western Calendars called "The Correlation Problem" has been the subject of scholarly dispute for many years. The two best theories are 2 days apart and yield Gregorian dates for the end of the current cycle of 2012-12-21 and 2012-12-23, respectively.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Actually the mechanism is based on a binary 28bit set of discs. So even if its gummed up a bit, it'll be a zero or a one. The magazine discussed this. I wonder if mice even live at the site they picked out.
Do you really think an LCD display will last 10000 years?
I recall LCD displays on gas pumps that didn't last through the winter. They were damaged by freezing weather and didn't have backheating.
Electronics can be made moderately reliable for 20 years, but I wouldn't bet on much longer than that.
Tag lost or not installed.
Thus is exemplified the process of thinking too narrowly. The clock is not about showing us off to tomorrow, but about connecting us with them. It's a work of engineering genius, not a time capsule.
The article goes on about how accurate the clock is for a long time. But then uses this extremely vague word to describe its precision.
My first thought was of a George Carlin bit "There's a moment coming soon. Any moment now... Aw shit, its gone!" (probably mis-quoted)
Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years.
Minutes would be nice too.
Wouldn't an eruption of the super volcano in the western United States completely destroy this clock? Wouldn't a large earthquake (The Big One) that dumps the western seaboard into the ocean also potentially destroy the clock? IIRC, both would probably occur in the next 10,000 years.
There are some interesting parallels.
Mechanical computation features prominently in both Babbage's engines and in the Long Now clock.
And the lay public seem to have approximately equal levels of difficulty in understanding how each device is supposed to work....
~Idarubicin
While all this sounds complicated to have in a little alarm clock, it's of course done in a couple of minutes on any Linux/*nix box.
I had that on my previous home server. Just a few crontab entries, which would play various sounds. I also set it up for a short while to play an Internet radio stream to wake up, but that bored me quickly.
The most useful were 2 different sounds for the 2 different times the 2 (small) children had to leave for school. That was incredibly effective. Instead of constantly having to try to convince them they should hurry up and go, we just watched them hear the sound and hurry up, without having to say anything.
The icing on the cake was a small text file keeping track of school holidays and one-time schedule changes, so the sounds would always and only go off at the right days and times.
If getting your children to leave for school drives you mad every morning, I highly recommend that solution.
Eventually they'll study it and learn and advance. Nothing wrong with that .. Egyptians, Greeks etc. advanced because of religious beliefs and curiosities.
Deposit $10,000 in a savings with 2% apr ($200 per year) and buy a new cheap clock every month.
...Stonehenge has long since worn out. I wonder if there was an equivalent article when it was being thought up?
Because this depend of the earth roation speed variation that no one can predict for a such long time now.
t
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second
http://hpiers.obspm.fr/iers/bul/bulc/bulletinc.da
http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/leapsec.html
http://maia.usno.navy.mil/eo/leapsec.html
http://maia.usno.navy.mil/whatiseop.html
Last prediction are for one year ahead at most:
http://maia.usno.navy.mil/ser7/ser7.dat
Did you realize that the next new year will be after the 31 december 2005 at 23 hour 59 minute and 60 seconde, not 59 seconde ? So this clock will show false time in a few months, no needs to wait 10'000 year!!!
...or until the power goes out. Whichever comes first.
There is also a book, also called The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility , attempting to explain the thinking behind the clock, and the effects of humans over long time spans as well.
"'Danny's intelligence is the rarest of kinds,' says Rose. 'The sheer practicality of his knowledge makes him a true genius.'
As an MIT undergrad in 1975, Hillis and his friends built a binary computer out of 10,000 Tinkertoy pieces. It could beat all comers at tic-tac-toe. About a decade later he invented an electronic mainframe computer called the Connection Machine that worked somewhat like a human brain; instead of one processor, it had 65,536, all firing at once like buzzing neurons, a model that supercomputers have used ever since. The irony is inescapable: The architect of the world's fastest machine now designs the world's slowest."
Holy hell, he built a tinkeroy machine that could beat all comers at tic-tac-toe? He IS a genius!!
Pheh, the model that the Connection Machine used is NOT used in all supercomputers ever since. In fact, the model was scrapped because it was too hard to code for.
So either Hillis was tooting his own horn to the reporter (, lying), or the reporter was rather the opposite of what he was lauding Hillis for.
Po Bronson's book "The Nudist on the Late Shift" has an excellent chapter on Danny Hillis and specifically the Clock. Very informative, and you actually have the way Hillis thinks and works laid out to you word by word and the overall grand purpose of the Clock described. The rest of the book is great, from a dot-com boom history perspective.
ISBN 0-7679-0603-9
Picked mine up at 7-Eleven for $0.69; read it 3 times.
Ive got a clock that has run accuratly for millions of years. Your standing on it. The Earth is apparently a comptuer to, but that is all in the H2G2.
Remember Danny Hillis of Thinking Machines? He is a principal in the Long Now. ( and he answers email! ).
Get a loot at the website, and the pictures of the clocks. All increaidbly crispy. dig deep.
Propel, propel, propel your craft
theough the liquid solution.
Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically,
Existence is simply illusion.
It had stopped.
The first ten thousand years were the worst, and the second ten thousand years, they were the worst too. The third ten thousand years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.
It's the people you meet in this job that really get you down. The best conversation I had was over forty thousand years ago, and that was with a coffee machine.
The article mentions successive rooms in which ever "faster" components are on display. The thing is to be placed in a cave in California.
"Good news, everyone!"
I won't say that your statement is false (because I don't know that it is), but I will say that I believe "cathedral sickness" is a far greater concern than [pollution].
Cathedral sickness is when the roof weighs too heavily on the supporting pillars, causing the once-parrallel pillars to fan outward. Notice how many (even small) churches have metal bands running between the pillar tops; this is to prevent/combat cathedral sickness.
"Good news, everyone!"
I want to listen to MP3s as I get ready in the morning, not stupid NPR. I know I can probably rig up an easy solution to this, but why isn't it in alarm clocks yet?
You're also right about the sounds. My alarm clock keeps the lousiest time, but I keep using it because the alarm sound is tolerable. I no longer have as much problem hitting the snooze, but I end up waking up a little earlier each day (until daylight savings comes around and I get off my ass to reset it).
That is a significant design consideration. That's why it has the computation disks rather than a more conventional set of clockwork gears. It avoids the issue of lost accuracy caused by wear and the micro accumulations.
The big slow gears will have a tremendous torque behind them in spite of only turning once in a few centuries.
Wouldn't the clock itself be a manual. I mean, if you can see that the sun is in position X when midnight hits, etc etc, it would make sense to perhaps corellate the two.
You're right, if people had any standards and would demand decent products... Well, I can't even imagine the results, so it must be pretty unlikely.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Read the article. The clock corrects itself for variations in day length.
I have read the article and I found no explaination at all about how the clock can calculate the local time including the leap second. Ok, the clock have a synchronization of the earth rotation using the sunlight, but this in no way synchronized to the local time. First current local time is an offset of UTC and UTC is an offet to TAI and TAI is a averge of many atomic clocks, so the basic of our local time is not astronomic, but atomic (http://cr.yp.to/proto/utctai.html). This clock can be a impressive model of the astronomic motion, but this is the wrong way to tel the local time. Second, even for the astronomic motion I have doubts, since I never see a paper telling that the earth axis motion can be know for 10'000 year. But you can find papers that tel exactly the opposite: this motion is largely unpredictable as now for a such long time. See this URL about how complexe is the earth rotation axis http://mb-soft.com/public/precess.html and this URL about why this is impossible to predict at full precision this movement http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~rfisher/Ephemerides/earth_ rot.html. Did you know that such bulltins exists ftp://maia.usno.navy.mil/ser7/iersexp.sup ? Last, did you realiste that the local time is an human concept that have radicaly changed in less than one century ? How can someone assert that this will not change in 10'000 year ? Juste an exemple: the Asian earthquake end last year did have an observable impact on the earth roation, see http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2005/jan/HQ_05011_ earthquake.html. So keep in mind this basic facts: 1) astronomic motion is unpredictable in full precision for long time; 2) local time in based on atomic observation plus offset to keep it compatible with astronomic observation, not the opposit!
When you read an article, read the sidebars too, and discover things such as:
When you read an article, don't skip over the numbers, and you won't miss things such as:
The clock is intended to be accurate to the day, not to the second.
Finally, when you read an article, read at least two thirds of it, and you won't miss things such as:
From the article: "Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years." This is precisely what is impossible because of what I have wrote in my previouse post. How long is a year in any other systeme than TAI is unknow until the year has finish to be observed, no matter how complexe is the system you use. This clock will be one seconde too early from the first january of 2006. So the claim "can track seconds, hours, days, and years" is false. If you dont' belive me just wait the next new year.
Given that the great pyramids were torn up for their stone, the clock may have to be made of some as yet unknown more boring material.
The related problem is that, if they find the most boring material to build the clock out of, the fact that it's the most boring material makes it no longer boring.
What in the article leads you to believe that Brad Lemley is authoritative with respect to what the clock shall track?
Good question. I don't wants to verify every claims from the article. Time is a very complexe thing and it's incredible how many peoples know almost nothing about the time there use every day of there life. The article at some point make a mix between different type of time without a clear explanation. I reacted in a little provocating way, I agree, after not seeing (at this time) any post with good moderation pointing to the local time claim problem.
If there's a lot of this "boring" material, then demand will easily be satisfied. There are many types of stone that you could easily give a sizeable bolder to everyone on the planet and still not affect the supply.