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Re:Elephant Clock by mito2 on Friday July 13, 2018 @07:26AM (#17521976)
Here’s a detailed animation of how the Elephant Clock works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCW_wp0dgF4

Re:Elephant Clock by nicheasta on Friday July 13, 2018 @08:01AM (#17522137)
And how is the disk at the top rotated? I'm talking about the one that shows the number of hours since the sunrise.
Re:Elephant Clock by smudgymcscmudge on Friday July 13, 2018 @09:18AM (#17522663)
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.
Re:Elephant Clock by cicero on Friday July 13, 2018 @12:14PM (#17524208)
It appears that the dropping ball does something to advance it.
Re:Elephant Clock by pbhjpbhj on Friday July 13, 2018 @07:45AM (#17522050)
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.

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".

Re:Elephant Clock by Jedd on Friday July 13, 2018 @09:31AM (#17522773)
> 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

Re:Elephant Clock by smudgymcscmudge on Friday July 13, 2018 @09:33AM (#17522800)
Steve Jobs was a cultural engineer.
Re:Elephant Clock by Jedd on Friday July 13, 2018 @09:51AM (#17522962)
> Steve Jobs was a cultural engineer.

You mean like P. T. Barnum?

Re:Elephant Clock by pavel_lishin on Friday July 13, 2018 @10:48AM (#17523366)
I'm a crap history student, but wasn't this during a time when a central Caliphate ruled over most Muslims? It might be more accurate to say that calling him a "Muslim engineer" is like calling Steve Jobs a "Western engineer". Specifying a particular region he was from might be like calling Jobs a "California engineer".
Re:Elephant Clock by nf05papsjfVbc on Friday July 13, 2018 @09:45AM (#17522920)
Slightly off-topic but if the "history of science" is a subject that interests, I can recommend "The Cambridge Illustrated History of Science". It's an expensive book but I was able to borrow a copy from a library near where I live and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Re:Elephant Clock by Fifer82 on Friday July 13, 2018 @06:40AM (#17521809)
I found a video about it, pretty cool. http://www.1001inventions.com/media/video/clock
Re:Elephant Clock by djsumdog on Friday July 13, 2018 @10:23AM (#17523183)
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.
Re:Elephant Clock by pavel_lishin on Friday July 13, 2018 @10:49AM (#17523372)
Why was it a shit-town?
Re:Elephant Clock by grzm on Friday July 13, 2018 @10:51AM (#17523395)
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.

Re:Elephant Clock by RickJWagner on Friday July 13, 2018 @08:02AM (#17522141)
Cool article. My thanks to whoever posted it.