Jun 17
Sometimes a piece of design is so interesting, it’s hard not to drop everything and pay attention to it. Dressed in bright, bold colors, with sharp, tessellated forms, these origami clocks from U.K. firm Raw Dezign definitely fits the bill.
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Jun 14
At OpenSignal, each datapoint we collect has two timestamps: the time the reading was taken and the time the reading was inserted into our server. Because we make extensive use of SQLite cacheing on devices, these times can be far apart – sometimes up to the order of weeks. The app reading time, however, should always be before the server insert time, otherwise you have an apparent violation of causality. When we noticed this happening occasionally, we took a closer look and found widespread difficulties getting accurate time readings.
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May 29
Calling a clock the most accurate ever may sound like hyperbole, but physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado have built a pair of devices that can claim that title. The team used an optical lattice to address an issue that plagues atomic clockmakers: constantly shifting frequencies that negatively impact the accuracy of their measurements. For example, a single second can be defined by the frequency of light emitted by an atom when electrons jump from one state to the next, but those frequencies change as the atom moves. The optical lattice essentially suspends atoms to minimize the Doppler effect produced by that movement. By combining the lattice with the element ytterbium, the group was able to create a device that measures time with a precision of one part in 1018. To put that into perspective, Andrew Ludlow, one of the paper’s authors, said, “A measurement at the 1018 fractional level is equivalent to specifying the age of the known universe to a precision of less than one second.” To read more about the team’s work, you can find the full PDF at the source.
Via: MIT Technology Review, Gizmodo
Source: Cornell University Library (PDF)
Apr 03
Apr 01
Manhattan’s Oldest Time-Keeping Sidewalk Has Been Ticking for Over a Century
Posted in: Today's Chili
Deep in lower Manhattan, embedded in the sidewalk, is a clock that’s been ticking since long before you knew what time was. Installed in 1889 with a single redesign in 1940, the timepiece has counted off hundreds of minutes, and tens of millions of seconds, all while withstanding the endless march of both time and the pedestrians above it. More »
Mar 18
Welcome to IRL, an ongoing feature where we talk about the gadgets, apps and toys we’re using in real life and take a second look at products that already got the formal review treatment.
Is saying you need to keep track of six timezones a humblebrag? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but either way, don’t expect an apology from Mr. Darren Murph — the man is positively giddy about his new $3 Clocks app. You know who else won’t be issuing any apologies? Jon Fingas, our resident Canadian smartphone nerd, who says the BlackBerry Z10 isn’t half bad.
Filed under: Misc, Blackberry
Mar 15
How many times do you check your clock before going to bed to make sure the morning alarm’s been set? With Lexon’s new Flip it should really only be once since the top and bottom of the alarm clock feature the words ‘on’ and ‘off’ in big, obvious letters. More »
Mar 08
For the multitudes of cultural differences that exist throughout human civilization, we do share a single, universal goal: to build stuff bigger and better than the schmucks next door. Every single one of the seven wonders of the ancient world was created as a chest-thumping, neighbor-shaming testament to its builder’s awesomeness. That proud tradition continues even today with Saudi Arabia’s massive Mecca-clock, a timepiece so enormous it almost ended Greenwich Mean Time. More »
Jan 30
Galileo was the first to think to use a pendulum as a time keeper in 1637. An actual clock using the precise weighted mechanism was patented in 1656 by Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens. Roughly 350 years later, Christian Kim has reinterpreted the classic ticker with the modern Pendulum clock for Zwilling. More »
Jan 15
For years, Timex emphasized the durability of its watches with the memorable slogan, ‘takes a licking, and keeps on ticking.’ But even the most rugged of its timepieces could not survive the hardships this explosion-proof wall clock was designed to endure. More »
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