
Elephant Clock - raghava
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_clock
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mito2
Here’s a detailed animation of how the Elephant Clock works.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCW_wp0dgF4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCW_wp0dgF4)

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nicheasta
And how is the disk at the top rotated? I'm talking about the one that shows
the number of hours since the sunrise.

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smudgymcscmudge
I was wondering the same thing. The wikipedia article discusses it a bit under
the heading “passage of temporal hours”, but I couldn’t visualize it. I was
hoping the video would clarify that.

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pbhjpbhj
Al-Jazari's knowledge seems to have ultimately derived from a Baghdad library,
via the Banu Musa brothers.

I find the history of those libraries fascinating
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom).

Kinda OT.

Apparently he was a Yazidi Kurd; that's what the circumstantial evidence
shows, and there's no other evidence AFAICT.

It says "Muslim engineer", which would be like saying Steve Jobs was a
"Christian Engineer".

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Jedd
> It says "Muslim engineer", which would be like saying Steve Jobs was a
> "Christian Engineer".

I note that Ismail al-Jazari's wikipedia article [1] describes him as muslim,
and also an engineer -- which appellation are you concerned about here?

I'm unsure how that compares to describing Steve Jobs as either christian or
an engineer, though I'd be struggling to try to substantiate either
descriptor.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_al-
Jazari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_al-Jazari)

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smudgymcscmudge
Steve Jobs was a cultural engineer.

~~~
Jedd
> Steve Jobs was a cultural engineer.

You mean like P. T. Barnum?

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Fifer82
I found a video about it, pretty cool.
[http://www.1001inventions.com/media/video/clock](http://www.1001inventions.com/media/video/clock)

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djsumdog
If you are into horology, an interest podcast to listen to is S-Town. It's
about a amateur horologist who lived in a shit-town. He made a lot of money
restoring clocks.

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pavel_lishin
Why was it a shit-town?

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grzm
[https://stownpodcast.org/about](https://stownpodcast.org/about)

> "Brian, a longtime This American Life producer, started reporting this story
> more than three years ago, when he got an email from John with the subject
> line “John B McLemore lives in Shittown Alabama.”"

You can listen to the podcast which includes John McLemore himself and why he
described it so.

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RickJWagner
Cool article. My thanks to whoever posted it.

