Interesting to see why seiko calls their automatic line 21 jewels.
They don't call it that. "21 jewels" just describes the amount of rubies in the watch movement.
Mechanical Watch
201–210 of 425 posts
Re: Mechanical Watch
#202Normally I would crap (pretty hard) on web tech, because normally, it's only ever used to make websites harder to follow in the name of design, or to create new ways for ads to be served to me. This site, and the most recent blog entries on this site, are excellent examples of why web technologies are not all bad. People seeking new ways to make money make everything bad, eventually, and thankfully there are bastions…
People trying to make money is actually what drives rather a lot of the innovation that you enjoy every day.
The “capitalism bad” trope is a tired one indeed.
Re: Mechanical Watch
#203Bug report: the balance wheel animation when run on Firefox on my android eventually becomes a forced oscillator, with the slider running off to infinity
Re: Mechanical Watch
#204This blog itself is a work of art, like mechanical watches themselves
Re: Mechanical Watch
#205Normally I would crap (pretty hard) on web tech, because normally, it's only ever used to make websites harder to follow in the name of design, or to create new ways for ads to be served to me. This site, and the most recent blog entries on this site, are excellent examples of why web technologies are not all bad. People seeking new ways to make money make everything bad, eventually, and thankfully there are bastions…
People trying to make money is actually what drives rather a lot of the innovation that you enjoy every day. The “capitalism bad” trope is a tired one indeed.
nah, people trying to make enough money don't create Facebook. people trying to have enough to live comfortably don't create Amazon.
monsters create those companies, and monsters grow them.
growing larger and more profitable at any cost is called metastasis, and that's what's happening. lives get worse for most while the cancers grow and grow, almost unabated.
Re: Mechanical Watch
#206Wow. I had no idea how intricate and CLEVER the mechanism of a mechanical watch is. Being no engineer, I cannot imagine how someone could think of all these clever designs. (Yes, of course the mechanism evolved over time. Even so.) I have been wanting to buy an old mechanical watch. When I do, I will never again complain about how much a watch repair shop charges. Also, the explanation, presentation, and animations a…
You know, I had the somewhat opposite impression reading the article. For me, what is interesting isn't the absolute genius of the design (which of course, it is). I find it more interesting that the watch has had enough staying power as a useful machine in society over hundreds of years to have gone through thousands of design iterations to arrive at the "genius" design. If you have enough smart engineers over several hundred years working at a problem, such an elegant design seems almost an inevitability to me.
I would call it "clever" if one or two engineers created this over perhaps a decade or so. With thousands of engineers over several hundred years, however, it just feels like the natural evolution of things.
I feel that a lot of things happening in today's society will be the "watch" in 100-200 years. A marvel of complexity at first glance, and then an acknowledgement of how much "standing on the shoulders of giants" contributes to things that are enjoyed on a daily basis.
Re: Mechanical Watch
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
The tradeoff is that there is basically nobody else that has the expertise or time to do the same thing at a similar level of polish. We're not going to see more Ciechanowski-level posts unless new libraries and frameworks make it more accessible.
Maybe, maybe not. We should do the experiment, though.
What experiment do you mean?
Re: Mechanical Watch
#208https://ciechanow.ski/archives/ - the blog archive is full of such marvels.
Re: Mechanical Watch
#209I was curious how he did those visualizations so I looked at the source code. Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL [1]. Absolutely impressive stuff. Source code is non-minified so you can have a look and understand everything as well. [1]: https://ciechanow.ski/js/watch.js
Why is "codes everything by hand" surprising? Is WebGL a really shitty API or something?
Re: Mechanical Watch
#210I was curious how he did those visualizations so I looked at the source code. Turns out he codes everything by hand in WebGL [1]. Absolutely impressive stuff. Source code is non-minified so you can have a look and understand everything as well. [1]: https://ciechanow.ski/js/watch.js
Why is "codes everything by hand" surprising? Is WebGL a really shitty API or something?
> Is WebGL a really shitty API or something?
Yes. Almost no one uses it directly.