Salisbury cathedral clock | Hacker News Reader

Salisbury cathedral clock

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57 pointsVigier22 comments

I live near Salisbury and it's amazing how many locals don't know about this clock. The Cathedral is well worth a visit for many reasons, but this alone is a pretty good one.

The Cathedral is definitely worth a visit. So is the town.

But that whole area is fascinating. Stonehenge is a short drive North. A slightly longer drive North gets you to Avebury.

Much closer is Amesbury, which has Blick Mead on the outskirts, with evidence of occupation from nearly 9000 years ago.

http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Blick...

Nice part of the world. New Forest is only a short drive away, too, and definitely worth a visit.

Well count me as one of those locals, and one who has visited the Cathedral several times!

I got a bit distracted by the copy of the Magna Carta the last time I was there so was a bit blinkered to everything else.

Next time I'm in town I'll pop in!

It saddens me that machines like this are still functional after so many years while modern technology is just a piece of garbage that cannot be expected to work after five years or less. It saddens me because with my current skills I am completely sure that whatever I try to build right now will disappear in a couple of years and people will forget about me, I cannot even imagine Google being alive in a century, or who knows, maybe when the AI evolves to the point where we will have a walking/talking machine in every house named GoogleBot :D

If you think about it, most folks from that time weren't making clocks either. They were making lots of junk that has since been burned, buried, broken, or tossed down the out house hole. If you want to leave a legacy, you should stop being Yorman the Web Site Developer and try being Yorman the Artist or Yorman the Architect.

Most art and achitecture hasn't survived either.

It took the treasury of a cathedral to create that one clock. Silicon foundaries today make 100's of millions of timepieces each year. I like the modern approach.

That's more a function of the market than of our technology. I have a ~40 year old calculator that still works just fine. Partly because of that, I haven't bought a new calculator since then. Planned obsolescence produces more revenue.

Why does it matter if you are forgotten?

There are people thinking about this question: http://longnow.org/clock/

It's a little unfortunate that the best method we apparently have of dating these clocks is by voting by panels of experts, rather than by carbon-dating or whatever metallurgic equivalent there may be, which it appears can't be done

I can't believe I was there and I didn't see this. Oh well, I guess I got to see the Chronophage a bunch of times (which, BTW, was super lame.)

If you like clockwork, and you happen to be in Switzerland, try and visit Lucerne: there's a free clock museum there (in one of the towers of the old city wall) full of old church clocks --- one dating from 1535.

They're all running, although some are electrically wound, and they're all huge and with enough open space inside that you can see how they all work; some of them still ring.

Good views over the city, too.

What was lame about it? I hadn't heard of it before, but it sounds pretty awesome, from the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Clock)

As mrob pointed out, while mechanically interesting, the device looks really tacky. I might be that I had a lot of expectations about the clock, having read a bunch about it on the internet.

I used to travel to Cambridge on a regular basis at the time the Chronophage was installed, and I remember one day making a point of going all the way downtown to see it... and it was just super tacky. It looked like a prop you might find in Disney World or something. Out of context, like if I saw that in the middle of London somewhere, it might have been OK. But this is Cambridge: the clock is on King's Parade, the street where all the historical colleges are, stunning historical buildings all around. You are straight across from King's College Chapel, the most iconic building in all of Cambridge. You are a few feet away from The Eagle, a pub that has been around longer than the US has existed as a Republic. And in the middle of all that, you have this gold and blue LED monstrosity. It just feels completely out of place.

So yeah, if you are ever in Cambridge, I'd be more likely to recommend trying the amazing ostrich hamburgers in the street market about a block away from the Chronophage. Those are also out of place, but SO good, heh.

Gold + blue LEDs is about the tackiest combination I can think of. Blue LEDs were cool for a few years in the late 90s because they were new and high tech. I think they lost their fashion value in 2000 with the release of the PlayStation 2 (which had a blue power LED). By then it was obvious they were cheap and widely available. People still using blue LEDs in 2008 were clearly out of touch, and in 2016 the only way they can possibly be cool is if they're obviously ironic, which the Corpus Clock LEDs aren't.

Blue LEDs are the worst. They are the most annoying of LEDs, in part because of their ridiculous brightness, in part because blue light just disturbs sleep more for biological reasons. If I have a device with blue LEDs in my bedroom, it gets masking tape.

Yeah, I ordered a bunch of extensions cords from Amazon and they came with an extremely bright blue LED embedded in the on/off switch. Needless to say, I was no happy bunny the first night when I went to sleep with two of those in the room.

The use of LEDs makes all the mechanics seem pointless, and it's very shiny, which makes it look out of place. A friend described it as "like some chav's car covered in bling".

Hah, pretty much!

There's one of these at the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences. http://www.hmns.org/exhibits/special-exhibitions/the-chronop...

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