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"The project took five years and $15 million dollars before the first field test hit a slight snag when the bugged kitty was released near a Russian compound in Washington and was immediately hit by a car while crossing the street. The project was ended soon after."
Real talk: It is as if you held a mirror to my life.
The strange, surprisingly radical roots of the shopping mall Nov 29, 2016 / Steven Johnson
Victor Gruen was an avant-garde European socialist who inadvertently designed that all-American creature, the mall. But, as Steven Johnson reveals, his master plan was way grander — and one we might want to build today.
Go to Minnesota, follow Route 35 southwest of Minneapolis to the suburban town of Edina, and take the exit onto West 66th Street. You will eventually find a building complex floating like an island in a gray sea of parking, its exterior a jumbled mix of branded facades: GameStop, P.F. Chang’s, AMC Cinemas. Although this building looks unremarkable, it ended up defining an era: It is the Southdale Center, America’s first mall.
Today’s malls have a mostly well-deserved reputation for being the ugly stepchild of consumer capitalism, but their intellectual lineage is more complex than most people realize. While it would come to epitomize the cultural wasteland of postwar suburbia, the shopping mall was the brainchild of an avant-garde European socialist named Victor Gruen. Born in Vienna around the turn of the century, Gruen grew up, as his biographer M. Jeffrey Hardwick puts it, “in the dying embers of [Vienna’s] vibrant, aesthetic life.” He studied architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, working under the socialist urban planners then in vogue. He built up a fledgling practice designing fashionable storefronts, and he designed but never built one large-scale public-housing project.
Like many left-wing Jewish intellectuals, Gruen fled to the US as the ***** began marching across Europe. He arrived in America in 1938 not speaking a word of English, but by the next year he was designing boutiques on Fifth Avenue. He developed a signature style in his shop designs, with open-air arcade entrances flanked by giant plate-glass displays arrayed with goods. During the 1940s, his practice boomed; he built dozens of department stores across America. Echoing Le Corbusier’s famous line about a house being a “machine for living,” Gruen called his store environments “machines for selling.”
Yet Gruen never fully left his Viennese radical upbringing and its faith in the potential of large-scale planned communities. He hated the noisy, crass commercialism of unregulated spaces. In the 1950s, he gave a speech in which he denounced the banal landscapes of the post-war suburbs, calling them “avenues of horror … flanked by the greatest collection of vulgarity — billboards, motels, gas stations, shanties, car lots, miscellaneous industrial equipment, hot dog stands, wayside stores — ever collected by mankind.”
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Gruen began exploring more ambitious designs, and in 1956, just a few months after Disneyland opened its gates in California, Gruen completed work on Southdale Center. He designed Southdale as a two-level structure linked by opposing escalators, featuring a few dozen stores arrayed around a shared courtyard, protected from the weather by a roof. He modeled it after the European arcades that had flourished in Vienna and other cities in the early 19th century. But to modern eyes, the reference to European urbanity is lost: Southdale Center is, inescapably, a shopping mall.
Southdale was an immediate hit, attracting almost as much hyperbolic praise as Walt Disney’s park. “The strikingly handsome and colorful center is constantly crowded,” Fortune announced. “The sparkling lights and bright colors provide a continuous invitation to look up ahead, to stroll onto the next store, and to buy.” Most commentators focused on the vast courtyard space, which Gruen had dubbed the “garden court of perpetual spring,” where shoppers could enjoy sculptures, children’s carnivals, cafes, eucalyptus and magnolia trees, birdcages, and dozens of other diversions.
Gruen’s design for Southdale would become the single most influential new building archetype of the postwar era. Just as Louis Sullivan’s original skyscrapers defined urban skylines of the first half of the 1920s, Gruen’s mall proliferated, first in suburban America and then around the globe. Originally conceived as a way to escape the harsh Minnesota winters, Gruen’s enclosed public space accelerated the mass migration to desert and tropical climates made possible by the invention of air-conditioning. Today the fifteen largest shopping malls in the world are all located outside the US and Europe, and two-thirds are in countries with warm climates such as the Philippines, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Thailand. And while the mall itself would expand in scale prodigiously, the basic template would remain constant: two to three floors of shops surrounding an enclosed courtyard, connected by escalators.
But there is a tragic irony behind his success. The mall itself was only a small part of Gruen’s design for Southdale. His real vision was for a dense, mixed-use, pedestrian-based urban center with residential apartments, schools, medical centers, outdoor parks and office buildings. The mall courtyard and its pedestrian convenience were for Gruen a way to smuggle European metropolitan values into a barbaric American suburban wasteland.
Yet developers never took to Gruen’s larger vision. Instead of surrounding the shopping center with high-density, mixed-used developments, they surrounded it with parking lots. They replaced his courtyard carnival with food courts. Communities did blossom around the new malls, but they were largely uncoordinated developments of low-density, single-family homes. Of course, suburbanization had many winds in its sails, but Gruen’s shopping mall was one of the strongest. Southdale was going to be the antidote to suburban sprawl. Instead it became an amplifier.
Gruen’s ideas nonetheless attracted one devoted fan who had the financial resources to put them into action: Walt Disney. The 1955 launch of Disneyland was a staggering success, but the triumph of the planned environment inside the park created a kind of opposing reaction in the acres outside, which were swiftly converted from orange groves into cheap motels, gas stations and billboards. Disney grew increasingly repulsed by the blight and so he began plotting to construct a second-generation project where he could control the whole environment, not just the theme park but the entire community around it.
Disney planned to design an entire functioning city from scratch, one that would reinvent almost every single element of the modern urban experience. He dubbed it EPCOT, short for Experimental Planned City of Tomorrow. While the Disney Corporation would eventually build a future-themed amusement park named EPCOT, it had nothing to do with Disney’s vision, which would have been a true community with full-time residents, not another tourist attraction.
During his exploratory research, Disney fell under the spell of Gruen. Gruen had included kind words about Disneyland in his book The Heart of Our Cities and he shared Disney’s contempt for the sprawling “avenues of horror” that had proliferated around the theme park. And so when Disney decided to buy a vast swath of swampland in central Florida and build a “Progress City” — as he called it — Gruen was the perfect patron saint for the project. Like Gruen’s original plan for Southdale, it was going to be an entire community oriented around a mall.
Disney’s Progress City was to be profoundly anti-automobile. At the center of the city was a zone that Gruen had called the Pedshed, defined by the desirable walking distance of the average citizen. Cars would be banned from the Pedshed area, and new modes of transportation would appear to get residents downtown. Just as in Disney’s theme parks, all supply and service vehicles would be routed below the city through a network of underground tunnels. However, Disney died of cancer in 1966 while his project was still in the planning stages.
Why wasn’t a Progress City built? The easiest way to dismiss the Gruen/EPCOT vision is to focus on its having a shopping mall at its core. But the mall is too distracting a scapegoat and diverts the eye from the other elements that actually have value. The fact that urban critic Jane Jacobs, who had an intense antipathy to top-down planners, saw merit in the Gruen model should tell us something. Clearing out automobiles from entire downtowns; building mixed-use dense housing in suburban regions; creating distinct mass-transit options to fit the scale of the average trips; outing services below ground — these are all provocative ideas that have been explored separately in many communities. But to this day no one has built a true Progress City — which means we have no real idea how transformative it might be to see all these ideas deployed simultaneously. Mall or no mall, perhaps it’s time we tried.
Disney’s Progress City was to be profoundly anti-automobile. At the center of the city was a zone that Gruen had called the Pedshed, defined by the desirable walking distance of the average citizen. Cars would be banned from the Pedshed area, and new modes of transportation would appear to get residents downtown. Just as in Disney’s theme parks, all supply and service vehicles would be routed below the city through a network of underground tunnels. However, Disney died of cancer in 1966 while his project was still in the planning stages.
Why wasn’t a Progress City built? The easiest way to dismiss the Gruen/EPCOT vision is to focus on its having a shopping mall at its core. But the mall is too distracting a scapegoat and diverts the eye from the other elements that actually have value. The fact that urban critic Jane Jacobs, who had an intense antipathy to top-down planners, saw merit in the Gruen model should tell us something. Clearing out automobiles from entire downtowns; building mixed-use dense housing in suburban regions; creating distinct mass-transit options to fit the scale of the average trips; outing services below ground — these are all provocative ideas that have been explored separately in many communities. But to this day no one has built a true Progress City — which means we have no real idea how transformative it might be to see all these ideas deployed simultaneously. Mall or no mall, perhaps it’s time we tried.
Some Turkeys, a Dead Cat, and a Lot of Turkey Experts What's going on here?
By Eric Grundhauser MARCH 02, 2017
Nature is full of mystery, but none are as compelling at this very moment than why these turkeys are circling a dead cat.
As seen in a recently released video that has been spreading across the internet like overflowing gravy on a Thanksgiving plate, a group of turkeys was caught on tape walking in a nearly perfect circle around a deceased cat in the middle of the street. The person filming the strange behavior, which he tweeted, seems to be baffled by the birds’ conga line, but experts quoted across the internet seem to blame it on one thing: turkeys are kind of dumb.
An expert Gizmodo spoke with, posited that the birds were just curiously checking out a potential threat, and got locked in a hypnotic cycle of one bird following the tail of the one in front of it, unto infinity. Other turkey specialists, including ones quoted in The Verge, seem to have come to similar conclusions, saying they’d seen similar behavior in the turkeys before.
WASHINGTON, DC — There's hope for bringing back long-forgotten memories if research from the government's top scientists is successful. Scientists with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are building brain implants that may offer the key to restoring memories for the millions of Americans who have sustained a traumatic brain injury or suffer from memory loss. "We're opening the door to the possibility," said Dr. Justin Sanchez, the director of the agency's biological technologies office. "We're trying to understand what does it mean to interface with the nervous system? Do we have the technologies to understand what the brain is telling us?" As it turns out, we do. At DARPA's annual "Demo Day" at the Pentagon, Sanchez detailed some of the work his office had achieved in just a couple of years, specifically with its Restoring Active Memory program, or RAM. "We can identify the signatures of the brain that tell us when you're going to make a good memory recall or when you're going to stumble on your memory recall," Sanchez said. "And we can actually deliver direct stimulation to the brain in order to facilitate memory formation and recall." Put simply, initial findings from RAM tests on human subjects show that scientists can capture and understand signals from your brain, and they've learned that a little electrical jolt can sometimes help with memory formation. "If you had a traumatic brain injury and lost the ability to form and recall memories, if you had a medical device that could help you with that it can be transformative." Still, DARPA has plenty to learn. The agency is a long way off from a science fiction-like implant for healthy humans to have knowledge inserted into their brain — think "The Matrix" — or a world in which humans use just their thoughts to control things in the home. Though these wild ideas are certainly possible within our lifetimes, as Sanchez has said in the past. But right now, the agency is working out the "fundamentals" — seeing if human subjects can work with simple memories like facts or lists of words. "It's a really interesting future ahead of us," he said.
When I think back to what "modern medicine" was like when my grandparents were my age in the 60's... and my parents were my age in the 80's... and what we have now... and what we will have when I'm 80... a line from one of my favorite nerd movies of the 80's sums up what I think we may be in store for... "Doctor game me a pill, I grew a new kidney!"
All you have to do is watch Jason Bourne and understand that the genetic stuff in that movie isn't crazy future space technology. The kind of shizzle that happens in secret labs around the world is already way beyond just making people strong and smart. I want to take a pill that grows me gills like in Waterworld... might be "hard" now, but give it a couple decades and you'll be able to get those pills in vending machines.
This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It’s Taking Over Europe
Carl Zimmer
Frank Lyko, a biologist at the German Cancer Research Center, studies the six-inch-long marbled crayfish. Finding specimens is easy: Dr. Lyko can buy the crayfish at pet stores in Germany, or he can head with colleagues to a nearby lake. Wait till dark, switch on head lamps, and wander into the shallows. The marbled crayfish will emerge from hiding and begin swarming around your ankles.
“It’s extremely impressive,” said Dr. Lyko. “Three of us once caught 150 animals within one hour, just with our hands.”
Over the past five years, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues have sequenced the genomes of marbled crayfish. In a study published on Monday, the researchers demonstrate that the marble crayfish, while common, is one of the most remarkable species known to science. Before about 25 years ago, the species simply did not exist. A single drastic mutation in a single crayfish produced the marbled crayfish in an instant. The mutation made it possible for the creature to clone itself, and now it has spread across much of Europe and gained a toehold on other continents. In Madagascar, where it arrived about 2007, it now numbers in the millions and threatens native crayfish.
“We may never have caught the genome of a species so soon after it became a species,” said Zen Faulkes, a biologist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who was not involved in the new study.
The marbled crayfish became popular among German aquarium hobbyists in the late 1990s. The earliest report of the creature comes from a hobbyist who told Dr. Lyko he bought what were described to him as “Texas crayfish” in 1995. The hobbyist — whom Dr. Lyko declined to identify — was struck by the large size of the crayfish and its enormous batches of eggs. A single marbled crayfish can produce hundreds of eggs at a time. Soon the hobbyist was giving away the crayfish to his friends. And not long afterwards so-called marmorkrebs were showing up in pet stores in Germany and beyond. As marmorkrebs became more popular, owners grew increasingly puzzled. The crayfish seemed to be laying eggs without mating. The progeny were all female, and each one grew up ready to reproduce.
In 2003, scientists confirmed that the marbled crayfish were indeed making clones of themselves. They sequenced small bits of DNA from the animals, which bore a striking similarity to a group of crayfish species called Procambarus, native to North America and Central America. Ten years later, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues set out to determine the entire genome of the marbled crayfish. By then, it was no longer just an aquarium oddity.
For nearly two decades, marbled crayfish have been multiplying like Tribbles on the legendary “Star Trek” episode. “People would start out with a single animal, and a year later they would have a couple hundred,” said Dr. Lyko. Many owners apparently drove to nearby lakes and dumped their marmorkrebs. And it turned out that the marbled crayfish didn’t need to be pampered to thrive. Marmorkrebs established growing populations in the wild, sometimes walking hundreds of yards to reach new lakes and streams. Feral populations started turning up in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia and Ukraine in Europe, and later in Japan and Madagascar.
Sequencing the genome of this animal was not easy: No one had sequenced the genome of a crayfish. In fact, no one had ever sequenced any close relative of crayfish. Dr. Lyko and his colleagues struggled for years to piece together fragments of DNA into a single map of its genome. Once they succeeded, they sequenced the genomes of 15 other specimens, including marbled crayfish living in German lakes and those belonging to other species. The rich genetic detail gave the scientists a much clearer look at the freakish origins of the marbled crayfish. It apparently evolved from a species known as the slough crayfish, Procambarus fallax, which lives only in the tributaries of the Satilla River in Florida and Georgia.
The scientists concluded that the new species got its start when two slough crayfish mated. One of them had a mutation in a sex cell — whether it was an egg or sperm, the scientists can’t tell.
Normal sex cells contain a single copy of each chromosome. But the mutant crayfish sex cell had two. Somehow the two sex cells fused and produced a female crayfish embryo with three copies of each chromosome instead of the normal two. Somehow, too, the new crayfish didn’t suffer any deformities as a result of all that extra DNA. It grew and thrived. But instead of reproducing sexually, the first marbled crayfish was able to induce her own eggs to start dividing into embryos. The offspring, all females, inherited identical copies of her three sets of chromosomes. They were clones. Now that their chromosomes were mismatched with those of slough crayfish, they could no longer produce viable offspring. Male slough crayfish will readily mate with the marbled crayfish, but they never father any of the offspring.
In December, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues officially declared the marbled crayfish to be a species of its own, which they named Procambarus virginalis. The scientists can’t say for sure where the species began. There are no wild populations of marble crayfish in the United States, so it’s conceivable that the new species arose in a German aquarium. All the marbled crayfish Dr. Lyko’s team studied were almost genetically identical to one another. Yet that single genome has allowed the clones to thrive in all manner of habitats — from abandoned coal fields in Germany to rice paddies in Madagascar.In their new study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, the researchers show that the marbled crayfish has spread across Madagascar at an astonishing pace, across an area the size of Indiana in about a decade.
Thanks to the young age of the species, marbled crayfish could shed light on one of the big mysteries about the animal kingdom: why so many animals have sex. Only about 1 in 10,000 species comprise cloning females. Many studies suggest that sex-free species are rare because they don’t last long. In one such study, Abraham E. Tucker of Southern Arkansas University and his colleagues studied 11 asexual species of water fleas, a tiny kind of invertebrate. Their DNA indicates that the species only evolved about 1,250 years ago. There are a lot of clear advantages to being a clone. Marbled crayfish produce nothing but fertile offspring, allowing their populations to explode. “Asexuality is a fantastic short-term strategy,” said Dr. Tucker. In the long term, however, there are benefits to sex. Sexually reproducing animals may be better at fighting off diseases, for example. If a pathogen evolves a way to attack one clone, its strategy will succeed on every clone. Sexually reproducing species mix their genes together into new combinations, increasing their odds of developing a defense. The marbled crayfish offers scientists a chance to watch this drama play out practically from the beginning. In its first couple decades, it’s doing extremely well. But sooner or later, the marbled crayfish’s fortunes may well turn.
“Maybe they just survive for 100,000 years,” Dr. Lyko speculated. “That would be a long time for me personally, but in evolution it would just be a blip on the radar.”
Sounds like we need some of those in the lakes and streams around here... the crayfish populations in Maryland are way lower than they used to be (based purely on personal experience)
Sounds like we need some of those in the lakes and streams around here... the crayfish populations in Maryland are way lower than they used to be (based purely on personal experience)
The native population would be even lower if they had to complete for resources with a larger, rapidly reproducing invasive species.
Been a while since I visited this thread. I promise that if you stick around long enough, there will be a picture of a cat.
Came across a whole trove of photos posted by an enterprising young man who, along with a few friends, took it upon himself to visit a Soviet-era Typhoon-class submarine (known in Russian as the Акула, or "Shark") and take a shitload of photos. For those not well-versed in Tom Clancy, this was the boat featured in The Hunt for Red October, which allegedly represented the pinnacle of Soviet military design and technology. It's kind of sadly disheartening to see what the reality behind those cold-war-era fears actually looked like.
I have passed the original poster's Russian comments through Google Translate. Apologies for the quality of the grammar.
Type 941 shark it's the same typhoon: the biggest boat in the world
project 941 for domestic classification: AKULA, according to the NATA Typhoon / This is the third generation SSBN. The ship has 2 strong enclosures arranged in parallel and several strong modules connected by a single outer casing. It carries 20 solid-fueled rockets located between solid housings. In strong modules outside the PC there is torpedo armament on the nose of the boat and also the CPU and the REV equipment. Due to this arrangement, this ship has received the largest of all domestic and imported nuclear submarines, underwater and above-water displacement and the width of the hull. Surface: 23,200 tons, underwater: 48,000 tons. Length: 172 m, width: 23.3 m, draft: 11 m. Crew of 160 people. Currently there are only 3 out of 6 ships in the ranks, and even those are in some kind of cunning reserve. They are on the joke and they have, according to the agreement of MS Gorbachev, with the Americans, the equipment for managing the BR is torn out. Everything else is in place, but without these cabinets they are very peaceful :-))) I managed to visit one of these submarines and take photos. I was made inferior cameras, so do not kick strongly with your feet. It was in 2004.
(Cat photo, as promised.)
That last photo, of the head, makes me grateful not to have been born in the USSR.
About 25 years ago, I got a limited tour of the Providence - sister ship to the Dallas from Red October. My friend's brother was a junior officer on board, and the XO okayed a walk-around while they were in Groton for a refitting. Still being in duty, everything was impressively maintained.
"Those over there are torpedoes, the others next to them are Harpoon anti-ship missiles, and the ones in the stainless cigar cases are Tomahawk cruise missiles. Behind us, we have a vertical launch ability - the only Los Angeles class boat with it. I can neither confirm nor deny that we carry nuclear arms."
Besides gaining a greater respect for the submariners, I was struck by the actual machine. It's a bad-*** silent killing machine in the front and the back, with a nuclear power plant just forward of the rear torpedo room, with everything else being a large custom-fitted computer and JUST enough room around the systems for the crew. The Navy isn't playing for 2nd place.
When “Blowing Smoke Up Your ***” Was Much More Than Just A Saying
Discover the shockingly literal and thoroughly disturbing 17th-century medical origins of the idiom "blowing smoke up your ***."
“Oh, you’re just blowing smoke up my ***,” is something you might hear someone say when they think you’re just telling them what they want to hear. But in 18th-century England, blowing smoke up one’s *** was an actual medical procedure, and no, we aren’t kidding.
According to Gizmodo, one of the earliest reports of such a practice took place in England in 1746, when a woman was left unconscious after nearly drowning.
Her husband allegedly took the suggestion of administering a tobacco enema to revive her, a practice that was rising in popularity at the time as a possible answer to the frequent, local instances of drowning.
Left with little choice, the man took a tobacco-filled pipe, inserted the stem into his wife’s rectum, and, well, blew a bunch of smoke up there. As strange as it may sound today, it reportedly worked, the hot embers of the tobacco leaf jolting the wife back into consciousness, and the practice grew quickly from there.
But where did the idea to use tobacco as a form of medicine come from? Indigenous Americans, who used the plant to treat various ailments, invented what we refer to as the tobacco enema. English Botanist, physician, and astrologer Nicholas Culpeper borrowed from these practices to treat pain in his native England with methods including enemas to treat inflammation as a result of colic or a hernia.
Years later, English physician Richard Mead would be among the earliest proponents of using the herbal enema as a recognized practice, and helped bring its use, however short-lived, into mainstream culture.
By the late 1700s, the blowing smoke had become a regularly applied medical procedure, mostly used to revive people thought to be nearly deceased, usually drowning victims. The process was so common, in fact, that several major waterways kept the instrument, consisting of a bellows and flexible tube, nearby in case of such emergencies.
The tobacco smoke was believed to increase the heart rate of the victim and encourage respiratory functions, as well as “dry out” the insides of the waterlogged individual, making this method of delivery more preferred than breathing air directly into the lungs via the mouth.
Textbook drawing of a tobacco smoke enema device. 1776.
Before the implementation of an official instrument, tobacco enemas were typically administered with a standard smoking pipe.
This proved to be an impractical solution as the stem of a pipe was much shorter than the tube of the instrument that would come later, making both the spread of diseases such as cholera, and the accidental inhalation of the contents of the patient’s ---- cavity, an unfortunate yet common possibility.
With the tobacco enema’s rise in popularity in full swing, London doctors William Hawes and Thomas Cogan together formed The Institution For Affording Immediate Relief To Persons Apparently Dead From Drowning in 1774.
The group was later named the much simpler Royal Humane Society, a charitable organization that “grants awards for acts of bravery in the saving of human life and, also, for the restoration of life by resuscitation.” It is still in operation today and is now sponsored by the Queen of England.
Thomas Cogan
The practice of awarding life-saving citizens has been a hallmark of the society since its inception. Back then, anyone known to revive a drowning victim was awarded four guineas, equal to around $160 today.
Blowing smoke, of course, is no longer in use today. However, the tobacco enema had a good run during the 18th century, and its usage even spread to treat additional ailments such as typhoid, headache, and stomach cramping.
But with the 1811 discovery that tobacco is actually toxic to the cardiac system, however, the popularity of the practice dwindled quickly from there.
The Physics Of Why Timekeeping First Failed In The Americas
The world’s greatest clockmaker sent a clock to the new world, and everything went haywire.
For millennia, humanity’s one-and-only reliable way to keep time was based on the Sun. Over the course of a year, the Sun, at any location on Earth, would follow a predictable pattern and path through the sky. Sundials, no more sophisticated than a vertical stick hammered into the ground, were the best timekeeping devices available to our ancestors.
For countless millennia, sundials were the most accurate way of keeping time. Despite the repetitious nature of orbits, there is an inherent uncertainty, at any given moment, of approximately 15 minutes in what a sundial records.
All of that began to change in the 17th century. Galileo, among others, noted that a pendulum would swing with the same exact period regardless of the amplitude of the swing or the magnitude of the weight at the bottom. Only the length of the pendulum mattered. Within mere decades, pendulums with a period of exactly one second were introduced. For the first time, time could be accurately kept here on Earth, with no reliance on the Sun, the stars, or any other sign from the Universe.
One of the very first clocks ever produced by Christiaan Huygens, which operated on the principles of a fixed-period pendulum. The clock still survives today, and can be found in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
The most renowned clockmakers of the 17th century were Dutch, led by the great physicist Christiaan Huygens. Huygens made tremendous advances in the science of wave mechanics, optics, physics (discovering centripetal force), and astronomy (including investigating Saturn’s rings and discovering its giant moon, Titan). In 1656, however, he made his greatest contribution as a scientist and inventor: the pendulum clock.
The schematic design of the second pendulum clock built by Christiaan Huygens, published in 1673.
Huygens wasn’t the first to recognize that the gravitational acceleration at Earth’s surface, known today as g, was constant, but he was the first to put it to such tremendously good use. By applying that phenomenon to the problem of an oscillating pendulum, he was able to derive an extremely useful mathematical formula for the period of a pendulum:
T = 2π √(L/g),where T is the pendulum’s period, L is the length of the pendulum, and g is the gravitational acceleration at Earth’s surface. For this derivation, there are many historians who classify Huygens as the first modern theoretical physicist.
A pendulum will swing with a specific period dependent not on its mass, the amplitude of its swing, or a host of other factors. Only the length of the pendulum and the value of the location gravitational field determine the pendulum’s rate of oscillation.
But this was the beginning of Huygens’ work on pendulum clocks. He realized that, so long as you kept your pendulum powered so that it would continuously tick away with the same, small amplitude to its swings, you could keep time indefinitely. He then went a step further, and not only built his own clocks, but published a design by which anyone could do it.
Within just a few years, clockmakers in the Netherlands and England were able to keep the time, accurately, to within a few seconds over the span of a full day. For nearly 300 years, until the early 20th century, the pendulum clock remained the most accurate timekeeping standard accessible to humanity.
A new standard in the world’s most accurate timing device was set by this ‘atomic clock’ invented in 1955 at Columbia University by Professor Charles H. Townes (left) with the assistance of Dr. J.P. Gordon (right). Atomic clocks were temporarily surpassed by pulsars, but have regained the crown as the most accurate way humans keep time in the Universe.
The American continents, however, then known as the New World, had no such clockmakers available. It wouldn’t be until 100 years after Huygens that the first American-made pendulum clock was constructed. The way, then, to keep time more accurately than a sundial would be to take one of the world’s best, Dutch-made clocks, and bring them, via ship, to the New World.
Any motion would disturb the period of a pendulum, so accurate timekeeping — at that time — was only possible in a stationary location. The clock would be constructed and calibrated in the Netherlands, shipped overseas, and then restarted at its destination. Compared to a sundial, whose accuracy was limited to about ±15 minutes a day, the pendulum clock should have reduced those errors to merely a few seconds.
As soon as the clock arrived and was set up, it began keeping time more accurately than any timepiece before ever located on the North American continent. At least, that was what everyone assumed was happening for about a week or so. But after that amount of time, it became clear that something was amiss. The Sun and Moon weren’t rising at their predicted times, but rather were off by a bit.
Even worse, the amount that the clock was off by appeared to be getting worse over time: whatever error was at play was accumulating. Instead of these reliable, celestial events occurring at the predicted times on the clock, they were occurring earlier, according to the clock. Something was wrong. The clock was not only running slow, but appeared to be losing close to a minute per day.
The balance spring system, developed by Christiaan Huygens, is one of the many components that went into a well-engineered pendulum clock. When the clock was returned to the location of its manufacture, it kept time perfectly once again, allowing people to determine that it wasn’t a flaw with the clock, but rather gravitational variations, that caused the clock to keep inaccurate time in the New World.
This was completely unacceptable! Timekeeping, by the end of the 17th century, was accurate to within 2-to-4 seconds per day. Why would that be happening? The only assumption that the colonists of the New World could figure out — since there were no clockmakers (or clock-repair experts) present — was that the timepiece must have somehow been damaged during the journey.
So what can you do in that situation? The same thing you do today: send it back to the manufacturer for repairs. So this enormous, heavy, complicated clock was shipped all the way back to Europe, where the Dutch clockmakers examined it for defects.
When they restarted the clock back in the Netherlands, they received the biggest shock of all: the clock worked exactly as designed, keeping time as precisely as any other similar timepiece: to within just a few seconds per day. Although this experience will sound familiar to anyone who’s noticed funny behavior in their car, took it to the mechanic, only to have the problem disappear when it arrived, there was a reasonable explanation for what happened here.
In fact, no one’s observations or measurements were wrong, nor were there any mechanical problems. The only thing that was different, that nobody realized at the time, was that the acceleration due to gravity at Earth’s surface, g, isn’t the same everywhere on Earth.
The layers of Earth’s interior are well-defined and understood thanks to seismology and other geophysical observations. The gravitational acceleration is determined by the masses beneath your feet and your distance to the Earth’s center, meaning there are gravitational variations due to latitude, altitude, and the composition of Earth’s interior from place to place.
Our Earth isn’t a perfect, uniform sphere, but a rotating layer-cake. The atmosphere sits atop the surface, which has a complex and unique topography that rises miles and miles above sea level in many locations, and dips down miles beneath sea level in the deepest trenches. There’s an enormous, massive ocean atop the crust, which floats atop the mantle, which itself envelops the outer and inner core. As the Earth rotates, it bulges at the equator and compresses at the poles.
When you take all of these factors into account, you’ll learn that the value of gyou learned in physics class — 9.81 m/s2 — is only the average value of g at planet Earth’s surface. If you went all over the world, you’d find that g actually varies by about ±0.2% in either direction: from 9.79 to 9.83 m/s2.
The difference in g is most pronounced with latitude: equatorial (smaller) latitudes have lower values of g and polar (higher) latitudes have larger values. Because of the latitude differences between the Netherlands and the location where the clock resided in the New World, g was different (smaller) by about 0.01 m/s2 in the Americas. This is what caused the clock, operating with a period given by T = 2π √(L/g), to lose about 45 seconds per day.
The solution? You have to make sure that the ratio, (L/g), stays constant. If gis 0.1% smaller in a new location, shorten the length of your pendulum (L) by 0.1%, and you’ll keep time properly again. If g is larger, lengthen your pendulum accordingly. Only with the proper period can a pendulum clock keep the time as it was designed.
A clock that has a pendulum of a specific length will keep time accurately so long as the precise gravitational field of Earth is at the correct value for the pendulum’s calibration. If moved to a location with a different local value for gravity, a different length for the pendulum will be required.
The reason your pendulum clock keeps track of time so well is because each swing of a pendulum takes the same amount of time to complete. The only two factors that determine the swing time, under ideal conditions, are the length of the pendulum and the gravitational acceleration at Earth’s surface. Even though the Earth is very close to a perfect sphere, and even though the acceleration due to gravity is almost constant everywhere, these tiny differences can add up. We had no idea that the Earth’s gravitational acceleration varied in the 17th century, and it’s arguable that we found out in the most unceremonious way. Yet even an unintentional experiment can be groundbreaking and educational, as bringing a Dutch-made pendulum clock to the New World proved to be. At the end of the day, whenever you learn something new about the Universe, it has to be considered a victory.
It's amazing to me how much effort the human race has put in to accurately measuring time, yet we still use the Babylonian sexagesimal system they derived based on willfully cludged astronomical observations. They knew there weren't 360 days in a year. But here we are, thousands of years later, worshipping the relationship between Mesopotamian sun and moon Gods in ignorant bliss.
Of course, for purely political reasons, I'll be at work at 2am tomorrow morning to make sure that technology properly conforms to our twisted notion of what was best for farmers in the 19th century.
I wonder if anyone had every sat down and calculated the actual cost of having tens of thousands of engineers sitting at their terminals at 2am on a Sunday, twice every year, hoping that absolutely nothing interesting happens.
It's even weirder at a TV network headend in the midwest. 2am happens three times for us. Once on the east coast feed, then an hour later locally, and then two hours later on the Pacific feed. This year, I made an executive decision and said (paraphrasing): "**** it. We're just going to let the time be wrong for one hour on the east feed and for two hours on the west feed. A minor discrep in the Nielsen logs at 2am on a Sunday when viewership is damn near zero isn't worth the hassle."
Of course, for purely political reasons, I'll be at work at 2am tomorrow morning to make sure that technology properly conforms to our twisted notion of what was best for farmers in the 19th century.
I wonder if anyone had every sat down and calculated the actual cost of having tens of thousands of engineers sitting at their terminals at 2am on a Sunday, twice every year, hoping that absolutely nothing interesting happens.
It's even weirder at a TV network headend in the midwest. 2am happens three times for us. Once on the east coast feed, then an hour later locally, and then two hours later on the Pacific feed. This year, I made an executive decision and said (paraphrasing): "**** it. We're just going to let the time be wrong for one hour on the east feed and for two hours on the west feed. A minor discrep in the Nielsen logs at 2am on a Sunday when viewership is damn near zero isn't worth the hassle."
I wonder similar things when the "All Hands" meetings consistently start 15-20 minutes late. I realize that we are a multi-billion dollar company, but how much does it cost to have 5,000+ people sitting around waiting for a meeting to start?
From the article: "The new clock will neither gain nor lose a second over 3.7 billion years, the researchers report, giving it the title of the world’s most precise clock". I wonder how they'll know?
I'm currently wearing a watch out of a Chinese factory. the movement is an automatic Seagull ST25 variant. The design dates to about 2003 but intertwines with the history of the Chinese watchmaking industry dating back to the mid 1950s. The Tianjin Watch Factory (now Seagull) was the first maker of 100% Chinese watches. They almost stopped making mechanical watches but decided against that and have continued making and improving the designs over the years.
It was quite inexpensive, as automatic watches go, but it's pretty neat to wear.
Here is the back. I did a quick slow motion so you could see the balance wheel doing its thing. Normally it's oscillating 6 times a second (21,600 bph).
01-25-2017, 10:19 PM
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