Let the Japanese teach you how to get up, dressed, brush teeth, prepare & eat breakfast, bind your tie in just 5 minutes!
What an awesome clock:
The Corpus Clock has been invented and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior of the college’s new library building.
It will be unveiled on 19 September by Prof Stephen Hawking, cosmologist and author of the global bestseller, A Brief History of Time.
The £1 million timepiece, known as The Corpus Clock, has been commissioned and designed to honour the John Harrison, who was famously the pioneer of Longitude and inventor of the esoteric clock mechanism known as a grasshopper escapement.
The clock has been designed by the inventor and horologist Dr John Taylor and makes ingenious use of the grasshopper escapement, moving it from the inside of the clock to the outside and refashioning it as a Chronophage, or time-eater, which literally devours time.
The Corpus Clock & Chronophage – Hi-Res
It’s okay! Get rid of it. I think if anything, daylight saving time brings more trouble than good. Adjusting the clock twice a year is annoying and does not save you time! Join the rest of the world, we lived without daylight savings and are happy.
Obama Looks to Axe Daylight Time — NYT Explains Why
In order to conserve energy, President-elect Barack Obama wants to eliminate daylight saving time.
Twice a year, a bunch of countries, including most of the United States, practice daylight saving time or DST, shifting one hour ahead in the spring and one hour back in the fall. While I go through the whole twice-a-year ritual of looking for clocks, I only vaguely understood the reason behind it. I knew it had to do with more sunlight during waking hours and I assumed it was to save energy.
Turns out, according to two academics on the NYT Op-Ed page, there is little scientific proof that this reduces energy consumption. It also turns out that this practice could be wasteful, a bit annoying, and a lot of people, including Obama, want to get rid of it.
A study in Indiana, a state that recently started DST, showed an overall increase of 1 percent in residential electricity use with occasional increases of 2 to 4 percent in late spring and early fall. So much for conserving energy. (Source: Green Daily)
Here’s a more detailed explanation from New York Times.
What’s the Point of Daylight Time?
Daylight time costs Indiana households an average of $3.29 a year in higher electricity bills, or about $9 million for the whole state. We also calculated the health and other social costs of increased pollution emissions at $1.7 million to $5.5 million per year.
What explains this unexpected result? While daylight time reduces demand for household lighting, it increases demand for heating in the early spring and late fall (in the mornings) and, even more important, for cooling on summer evenings. Benjamin Franklin was right about candles, in other words, but he did not consider air-conditioners. (Source: New York Times)