The frame, perhaps, but the rest of it looks Victorian at the very oldest, more likely from the 1960s restoration, when people were not so much into conservation as they were into modernisation.
I don’t think this detracts from the picture of it as a very old clock, as it has almost continuously functioned as a clock since its inception - if anything, it makes for a nice palimpsest of horological technology, and speaks of a continuity of care that is markedly rare.
“But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question.
“But it’s burnt down?”
“Yes.”
“Twice.”
“Many times.”
“And rebuilt.”
“Of course. It is an important and historic building.”
“With completely new materials.”
“But of course. It was burnt down.”
“So how can it be the same building?”
“It is always the same building.”
I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
https://www.bbc.co.uk/lastchancetosee/sites/radio/aye_aye.sh...
https://archive.org/details/Last_Chance_To_See_CDs
(Edit: This version seems to be the Windows 3 version only.)
Part of the work is a certificate of authenticity and a detailed guide for taping a fresh banana to a wall (it must be exactly 1.6 meters above the ground). Because the banana rots, this gives you permission to recreate the banana taped to a wall as needed for display.
It's brilliant because it makes you question what the "essence" of a work of art is. Literally anyone can tape a banana to a wall. But you don't have the artist's intent allowing you to do so.
Maybe Douglass would have approved. That makes me feel slightly better
> Work began in 1985. [...] The wooden framework was cleaned, and corrosion on metal parts removed. The covering was the only part of the aircraft replaced. The new covering was more accurate to the original than that of the 1927 restoration.
Also of note:
> In 1910 the Wrights offered the Flyer as an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, but the Smithsonian declined, saying it would be willing to display other aeronautical artifacts from the brothers. Wilbur died in 1912, and in 1916 Orville brought the Flyer out of storage and prepared it for display at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[30] He replaced parts of the wing covering, the props, and the engine's crankcase, crankshaft, and flywheel.
He rejected the comparison with western monuments as the Ise exists as a project of continual renewal. Not just in practice, but socially, religiously, and also in style and detail. It is a ship of Theseus, but where the whole ship is replaced, it is not even necessarily the same ship, and besides, the ship is just the tangible form of the communities of teachers and craftsmen and fisherman which exist around it. It is the lost wax part of the cast.
(Isozaki was interestingly also a metabolist along with Tange and Kurokawa, which I guess I think is, in a tangential sense, related.)
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516051/japan-ness-in-archite...
"mechanised winding system, ending the requirement for somebody to climb the narrow, winding staircase each day to the clock room to do the job by hand"
It feels like something has been lost even if I don't know what. It's not that I want the job but we might be modernising and automating away human purpose in the world. There is something about someone visiting the mechanism daily that feels like it gives it life. An act of observation. There may be some practical sense to it e.g. spotting problems and what you "feel" in the mechanism as you manually wind it.
Growing up in San Diego, we often visited Presidio Park, site of the San Diego Mission, or was it?
It was only 17 years ago when I managed to untangle the relationship between the Mission de Alcala in the valley and the Presidio on the hill.
I told my friend from Spain that we could go visit, and she exclaimed "a prison? why visit a prison?"
And one or more buildings of the Presidio has been completely rebuilt, as replicas, as a museum and tourist attraction. And everyone told me the grass mounds outside were burial sites or something.
But as a child I didn't get it; the building just looked like an old mission from the photographs and they had nice exhibits about what life was like tending crops and winepresses. Also, there is an observation point on the third floor, where you can see the Pacific Ocean and all of Mission Valley.
A long time ago, and for a couple years, I lived next to the stadium there and regularly bought meat from the Iowa meat farms butcher -- I did not even know Mission de Alcala existed or the areas history until today! (thanks for the post) And I drove past it all the time. These days thats the kind of historical site I travel around to visit; some variation of the phrase youth is wasted on the young comes to mind.
As soon as I saw the headline, I knew this HN cliché would be one of the first comments.
Your body has replaced all of its cells several times already in your lifetime. Are you not the same person?
With a clock - the matter arguably is the stuff, as you can stop and start it at will.
If you want to prevent a philosophical debate, that's a very risky question to ask :)
That is the Ship of Theseus argument using other words.
> Your body has replaced all of its cells several times already in your lifetime
Not true. Cells like neurons, heart cells, skeletal muscle cells are permanent (with minor caveats).
Later, without the external field, you can cut it in half and both halfs will grow a second head.
It's not genetic expression, but the electric field of the flatworm that has changed permanently and is directing cell growth.
So if your entire body has its own field, that retains its uniqueness, and can even cause cell specialization what then?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2132148-bioelectric-twe...
“A totally normal-looking worm with a normal gene expression and stem cell distribution can in fact be harbouring a [body plan] that’s quite different,” says Levin. “That information is stored in a bioelectric pattern – it’s not in the distribution of tissues or stem cells, it’s electrical.”
What parts dont look 16th century?
Many aspects look identical to this, albeit smaller, clock from the 16th century. Note the pin holding the frame together, an exact miniature of the town clock.
https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co531/1...
It certainly does not look like the mechanisms seen on the streets of a 16th century farming village, but even today the most high tech devices are generally out of public view.
Your argument on parts being replaced is interesting though... Reminds me of Triggers broom.
> The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a paradox and a common thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having all of its original components replaced over time, typically one after the other.
If Windows was licensed to a particular hardware computer, how would you define that computer? Being a common practice to upgrade RAM, disks, PCI cards, and even CPUs, and Windows could enumerate every component on each boot, how much different would a computer need to be, before the Windows license is invalid?
And people were tripped up by this, after replacing their motherboard. Windows had a threshold of changes where it would balk and demand reactivation.
This one didn't break 25 years ago with the Y2K bug and it won't break in 2038 either.
A vibe-designed version of this however could not even last 4 years (AI introduces leap year bug) or even 6 months (clock will break going back and forth adjusted for DST)
Well yes but it had to be manually wound and adjusted by someone on a very regular basis to continue functioning.
It's much more efficient than a human having to look at a sundial every 15 minutes and ring the bells manually but effectively the same thing, not an automated system.
> clock will break going back and forth adjusted for DST)
So you just fix it manually twice a year? Seems like a significant improvement : D
So does most software.
It definitely broke in 2015. FTA: “In 2015, one of the hammers used to strike the six bells came away and fell into the mechanism, jamming it and silencing the clock.”
> A vibe-designed version of this however could not even last 4 years (AI introduces leap year bug)
Irrelevant, as this clock doesn’t show dates.
> or even 6 months (clock will break going back and forth adjusted for DST)
That, this clock suffers from, too.
And one of the churches also rings their bells every 15 minutes (1-ring for each quarter). On top of this at 6:00am it rings a whole rhapsody of sounds for whole 5 minutes - "wake up people, time to go to work on a field!".
Initially it may be annoying, eventually you just get used to it, in the end you actually learn to figure out the time from the bell sound and make use of it.
Edit: I was imagining intersecting circles for some reason. All places not equidistant would hear them out of sync.
Clocks are very impressive.. useful.. and now there is almost no escape from them? What was lost?
This is a particularly impressive and useful clock. The benefits to the town are manifold. In these times, it might be worth examining their shadows, as well.
I mean, once you have a clock, anyone can tell time. I'm more impressed by those that can tell time by time of year and position of celestial objects. It's December and Orion is 20° above horizon so it must be close to...
What was lost is control of time for the individual. Time is such an externalised concept now, we can barely conceive of an internal, natural sense of time.
I wrote a blog post reverse engineering (including a detailed CAD model) and discussing a very similar but nearly 200 year older clock at the (relatively nearby?) Salisbury cathedral. It's a good chance to reflect on longevity and design philosophy. Seems relevant to share!
Operational means there is wear and someone must occasionally do maintenance etc.
Being on display unmoving obviously has no wear, but also more chance of being forgotten about, rotting, etc.
What more could you want?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude#Transport...:
“The first to suggest traveling with a clock to determine longitude, in 1530, was Gemma Frisius, a physician, mathematician, cartographer, philosopher, and instrument maker from the Netherlands. The clock would be set to the local time of a starting point whose longitude was known, and the longitude of any other place could be determined by comparing its local time with the clock time.”
smitty1e•8mo ago
"Oh, all right."
> A modification also saw the installation of a mechanised winding system, ending the requirement for somebody to climb the narrow, winding staircase each day to the clock room to do the job by hand.
867-5309•8mo ago
867-5309•8mo ago
peanball•8mo ago
867-5309•8mo ago