I have recently been experimenting with making cool looking stuff using Inkscape and The GIMP. These are tools for vector and general image manipulation (respectively), and beyond both being very powerful and well designed, they are also open source and free.
Anyway, after roughly an hour of manipulation, I made this image (below), which I think may signify a new hobby: when I don’t have anything else to do (a state which is, unfortunately, rare) I can draw stuff without having to worry about paper, pencils, skill I don’t have, etc. I intend to use this image for an avatar somewhere, or maybe just leave it lying around my hard drive until I delete it in twenty years. Regardless, I hope you like it.
The first project of the year in my physics class was to create a clock. This is not the kind of modern clock that we imagine at first, the kind with hands or lighted digits. No, all that was required was a consistent way to measure out a predictable interval of time (namely thirty seconds). Many people built water clocks, using the constant flow of water to measure out thirty seconds. Some people built ramps upon which a ball rolled down in a predictable amount of time. One guy even memorized a rap song that took exactly thirty seconds to recite.
I, however, used the power of gravity. No, I didn’t just drop something from 4.405 meters thirty times, though I did drop something. What I dropped was a weight, suspended by a string, which was wrapped around an axle, which spun a wheel, which was connected to a rod (off center) which was connected to a pendulum. The pendulum served to regulate the motion provided by the falling weight (escapement), as it has to completely stop twice every swing (every time it switches swinging direction), and thereby expends a consistent amount of energy, equal to that provided by gravitational acceleration at a certain critical speed. This speed I found to be roughly two “ticks” (swings of the pendulum) a second, and could thereby accurately and consistently measure out 30 seconds (+/- .4 seconds, I found) with every 55 ticks.
Perhaps a short video would illustrate this. I didn’t have it up high enough at the time I took the video, so I couldn’t get my full 30 seconds before the pendulum hit the ground. As can be seen, I used K’nex to build my clock (perhaps not the best building materials, but nice for making adjustments). Enjoy!
