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A thief who stole 106 rare clocks

smithsonianmag.com

41–50 of 61 posts

Re: A thief who stole 106 rare clocks

#41
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If even a portion of them chime the hour: the man is insane.

It's become a bit of a running gag with my wife to count the clocks in her parents' house when we visit and see if we come up with the same number. We rarely do, either because we have different interpretations as to whether a half-assembled clock counts or not or because we overlook one of many. We've yet to break into three figures, but we've gotten most of the way there. Midnight and noon are intense. Her father h…

Getting dangerously off topic, but I recently bought a GPS-syncing wall clock. Now it matches our computers! And everything else. No more concerns.

Re: A thief who stole 106 rare clocks

#44

A man with one clock always knows what time it is. A man with two clocks is never sure. We have no data on a man with 106 clocks.

Unless you're Doctor Emmet Brown. Also, Mr Pedantic is curious of your definition of a clock. If you are limiting it to just analog clocks with manual only adjustments sure, it might be hard to keep them in sync. But I'm willing to think that all of those reading this thread have clocks in sync

You would be _amazed_ how many issues you can get with so-called synchronized time. Ship on-board NTP servers are currently a thing of my team's nightmares.

Re: A thief who stole 106 rare clocks

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every clock is wrong; they're just wrong by different amounts.

Surely one clock is right. Kind of like how the kilogram used to be always right.

You'd need to steal a lot more than 106 clocks to control the UTC timescale, (un)fortunately.

Only then could you say that your clock is "right" -- and only a month in arrears (https://www.bipm.org/en/time-ftp/circular-t).

Re: A thief who stole 106 rare clocks

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're Doctor Emmet Brown. Also, Mr Pedantic is curious of your definition of a clock. If you are limiting it to just analog clocks with manual only adjustments sure, it might be hard to keep them in sync. But I'm willing to think that all of those reading this thread have clocks in sync

You would be _amazed_ how many issues you can get with so-called synchronized time. Ship on-board NTP servers are currently a thing of my team's nightmares.

Well, don’t leave us hanging
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