Impractical Timekeeping
Uh-oh, the in-laws finally have my number—they’ve stumbled upon my fondness for odd timepieces. There are plenty of appealing clock faces out there, but I’m not so interested in anything that could be built using a standard movement. No, since timekeeping is so efficient these days that you can literally get watches in cereal boxes, it’s much more interesting to see devices whose creators have made a deliberate effort to be impractical: flip clocks, nixie clocks, binary clocks, and the like. Not only did Justina’s parents get us a marble clock, which I’ve been wanting since I first saw one as a kid, but they also gave us a nifty pin clock:
The pin clock is uses a typical 7-segment number display, except that instead of using LEDs, the segments are made up of little pins with solenoids behind them to push them forward when they’re on. The digits change with a satisfying “chunk”.
The marble clock is also interesting from an aural perspective—the nature of the mechanism means that it makes different types of clattering sounds at every minute, 5 minute, and hour increment. I think I’m going to try living with it in my office, to see whether the sounds of time passing will be helpful, distracting, or simply drowned under my music.