Dear Chris, As always, you prompt further thought...
> Gears, although limited to an integral number > of teeth, are essentially analogue devices, > aren't they? Er, not sure :-) In earlier days, I spent many a happy hour looking at clocks and counting teeth. That felt like a digital experience at the time but it may have been analogue after all! You (citing Kevin) are right that the Clock of the Long Now has an extended cam which takes long-term changes in the EoT into account. With that kind of feature, you can deal with most of the more obvious parameters like the EoT, obliquity, eccentricity and so on, for a long time to come. The one thing such mechanisms can't handle, because we simply can't predict it, is the tiresome matter of the length of the day... We can see the general trend but there is horrid superimposed noise which means we cannot predict leap seconds very far ahead. The Clock of the Long Now deals with this by poking its head above ground at intervals to check the sun. If gear wheels are analogue, then maybe the Clock of the Long Now is really a sundial? I think you are onto something :-) All the best Frank --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
