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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.
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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.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
"Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years"
Now i can get rid of my solar clock on my lawn
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
No, it was most probably for monitoring the decay of disposable nappies in landfill sites.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Remember, we're talking about 10,000 year timescales. A nine year old story is practically lightning fast!
If it tells you new year while it has summer temperature outside, you know that either the clock went wrong, or the global warming was real, after all :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
.. and when it suffers a power loss it will flash
12:00:00.0000
My employer will probably implement this as a timeclock...
Lunchtime doubly so
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Since the current season of BSG has ended the answer to that question is yes so you need not bother to wonder.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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?
And then the boulder starts rolling, arrows, pygmies, etc. Lets put a video camera in there, Lucas will foot the bill.
It's called "the sun."
I think it's got another 5 billion or so years left on it, too.
What?
Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they?