Creepy Clocks

Clocks shouldn't be that scary, right? I mean, Dali's melting clocks were a bit unnerving, but they were just a painting. Recently, though, I've been having clock issues.

When I first got to Cambridge, I noticed crowds of people gathered in front of a window-display in the side of a building. It looked like they were looking at some kind of clock, but I couldn't figure out why they were all piling up there, since there are so many interesting things to see in Cambridge. Later on, though, I discovered that they were looking at the newly-introduced Chronophage. While the Chronophange is weird, I don't actually find it all that great. It's scary-looking and not exactly practical. Sometimes it is difficult to tell the time based on the blinking LED lights, and, although apparently designed based on solid traditional clockwork principles, the Times had this to say about it:

The timepiece is completely accurate only every five minutes. The rest of the time, the pendulum pauses then corrects itself as if by magic.

Uh huh.

Meanwhile, on a smaller level, a clock that Nick loaned me for the year is also extremely bizarre. It looks like a normal, or even slightly old-fashioned, alarm clock. I mean, it's not like the red one with the two bells, but it's close. He told me "it syncs with the radio." Now, the only interpretation I could make of this statement was that it was a clock-radio. Without, seemingly, a tuner.

No. He actually meant what he said. Somehow it picks up radio waves coming out of the air and determines the time from them. Yeah, I'm a little unclear on the exact mechanism of this, too. But it's not doing this constantly and making minor adjustments based on this. Oh no. Instead, in the middle of the night, at 1 or 2am, the clock stops ticking. Then, for the next 10 minutes or so, the hands on the clock just start spinning. Slowly and deliberately. They pause on midnight for a while, and then continue their slow spinning. The clock goes through at least one full 12-hour cycle, if not more, during these revolutions -- it's a long syncing process. Strange, too, since the clock is probably hardly adjusting the ultimate result at all. And, again, extremely creepy.