Spherical pocket watch
Watchismo's got a freakish and wonderful new pocket watch, the Eris:
Eris Planetary Sphere Watch (Thanks, Mitch!)Either way, this watch, designed by students from l'Ecole d'Arts Appliqués Genèva is a 100 % Swiss made product by Pierre Junod Switzerland and can be worn as a pocket watch, pendant or used as a small desk clock. The Materials are white hour hand & orange minute hand, anthracite anodized aluminum case, laser engraved figures, mineral glass, Swiss quartz movement, each watch is sold with a natural rubber strap to hang from your neck, a wall, anything you wish to have time fly by.
The time is displayed with two pointers (extended from hidden hands) floating around the "equator" of the globe. The minutes indicated on the upper hemisphere and the hours highlighted down below.
Previously:
- Watchismo Xmas guide - Boing Boing
- Pocket-watch made from carved bone - Boing Boing
- Boing Boing: History of electric watches
- Early calculator watch prototype - Boing Boing
- History of armored military watches - Boing Boing
- Pictorial history of kids' watches - Boing Boing
- Steampunk "gothic pirate spaceship" watch - Boing Boing
- History of slide-rule wristwatches - Boing Boing
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I haven't seen something I wanted so badly since I was 10 and first laid eyes on a Zoid.
Surely it would be better to use one 'hand' and have both hemispheres rotate around it independently?
#2, rosyatrandom:
Indeed. That would be clever. As it is, it's far less convenient to use than a conventional watch- it's not possible to tell the time at a single glance.
It's effectively just a watch with a hemisphere stuck on to obscure the hands. That's kind of dumb, really.
uhhh...this is ridiculous. You'd have to rotate the watch to try and locate the hour hand and minute hand if the time is say...3:45. A flat wristwatch seems to me to not only be classier, but a billion times more efficient.
Only one thing would have made this beautiful watch better......a display of the constellations on both spheres, preferably something taken from one of those gorgeous 18th century charts of the heavens, all the mythical creatures displayed.
Hmm, now I have to retrofit all of my clothes to have spherical pockets.
All hail Discordia!
Good luck getting that thermal detonator through an airport.
Difficult to tell from one pic but shouldn't the hour hand be nearer the 1 at 12:57? Also , it's easy to read the time shown but five to six, for example would be a p in the a. I'll stick to the G-shock ta.
Phantasm clock!
High-end watches are often set apart from their more normal counterparts by "complications", which for the most part make the watch harder to read.
It's beautiful, but I have a hard time imagining a spherical watch fitting comfortably in my pocket.
Ya te, ya te, yo to...
No thanks. I'd be constantly worrying about accidentally mixing it up with one of my thermal detonators.
Better yet. A moving indexed hemisphere, and a stationary indexed ring. Adding the number on the hemisphere with the associated line on the ring would give you hour/minute (depending on the hemisphere). That way you'd be able to read the time from any angle.
This is cool, but when I read the title I imagined something 1000x cooler. It should be in a glass sphere with a knurled winding knob on top. And have a chain. And more brass/guilding.
It's a pocketwatch sometimes steampunk is a moral imperative.
Also, with all that internal space, it should have a little tank for compressed CO2 so it can have a "whistle" alarm. (OK, that last part is a bit over the top)
Both Eris and Pluto are planets. Please do not blindly accept the controversial IAU definition, which was adopted by only four percent of its members, most of whom are not planetary scientists, and was immediately rejected by hundreds of professional astronomers led by
Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto.
One reason the IAU definition makes no sense is it says dwarf planets are not planets at all! That is like saying a grizzly bear is not a
bear, and it is inconsistent with the use of the term “dwarf” in astronomy, where dwarf stars are still stars, and dwarf galaxies are still galaxies. Also, the IAU definition classifies objects solely by where they are while ignoring what they are. If Earth were in Pluto’s orbit, according to the IAU definition, it would not be a planet either. A definition that takes the same object and makes it a planet in one location and not a planet in another is essentially useless.
Pluto is a planet because it is spherical, meaning it is large enough to be pulled into a round shape by its own gravity--a state known as
hydrostatic equilibrium and characteristic of planets, not of shapeless asteroids held together by chemical bonds. These reasons are why many astronomers, lay people, and educators are either ignoring the demotion entirely or working to get it overturned. I am a writer and amateur astronomer and proud to be one of these people. You can read more about why Pluto is a planet and worldwide efforts to overturn the demotion on my Pluto Blog at http://laurele.livejournal.com
As this idea has slowly started to migrate from my ass to my brain, I think it needs to be baked a little further... Won't work quite right as described.... Oh well...
@ Laurele:
Sorry, there's no way that most laypeople are going to memorize a bunch of new planet names. Easier to just banish Pluto with the rest of the freaks.
It's a bit smaller than a ping-pong ball, so it wouldn't be all that uncomfortable to carry in a jacket pocket, or a pocket with nothing else in it. I'm put off more by the price (higher than my rent!) than by the shape or functionality. Of course, until I find a watch that's awesome enough to justify it, I'm gonna stick with using my phone.
Looks don't always equal practicality.
So it's a sort of a little ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff?
It looks like a egg timer...
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/gimages/kitchen-21.jpg
Does it come with a Pokemon?