Glashütte Trash Clock – A 30-minute pendulum clock made from trash

For those who like long form journalism and want to know more about watch collecting and Glasshütte: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/confessions-of...

This is a functional 30-minute pendulum clock entirely from discarded materials—cardboard, zip ties, tape, a yardstick, and a paperclip escapement, built in the German Eldorado of precision watchmaking: Glashütte.

It also acts as a reference clock for GTC, a new satirical universal time standard.

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.

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. ;)

https://www.youtube.com/@TheClockStack/streams

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).

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'.

Oh so GTC isn't GMT mixed with UTC, it's just whatever time it is on the trash clock

Some more cool clocks, including gravity based clocks (not hourglasses):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywD5kngMuYM — British Museum - Curious Clocks and Watches through time with Oliver Cooke

This is really cool. Thanks for explaining this process so well.

Note the paperclips in the margins of the page, as you scroll to the bottom.

And how they interact with your mouse cursor.

Ingenious!

Thank you Roy. You made my day! :)

A good analogy for German engineering.