An Irrelevant Thing

This is about a thing I've been thinking about for a while that is completely useless, mildly interesting to very few people, does not improve on an earlier version, and is not aesthetically pleasing. That means it's neither marketable, nor useful, nor even art, making it irrelevant to the world in general. I've even used a decade-old obsolete piece of software to simulate it and aid in design. But it's functional, and it will work, if I'm ever able to build it physically.

The thing is a Binary Rolling Ball Mechanical Clock. What. The. Fuck. - you say. Maybe you've seen or heard of the old rolling ball contraptions that rolls a ball bearing down a series of ramps every minute in a clattering, noisy, annoying spectacle of useless chronography. The balls collect in a series of 5 minutes, dump into another series of 60 minutes, then hours, and you can look at the thing and maybe figure out what time it is before the next ball rolls down.

Maybe you've also seen a digital binary clock, which displays hours, minutes, and maybe seconds in a binary format. I won't attempt to explain binary, if you know it, you know it - it represent numbers with only 0s and 1s, on or off, with lights, or flags. This clock is even more time-consuming to read initially, but as you learn binary, it gets easier. The time in the pic at left is 0011:011001, or 3:25. Google 'binary clock', and you'll see plenty of examples, so we know that there are huge numbers of total geeks out there.

My idea combines the two - a rolling ball clock that displays the time in binary (warning: skip this paragraph if you don't want to hear about really boring details). This can be done in a couple of ways, either with several balls sitting in particular positions which represent numbers, or a single ball which trips those positions and turns on a flag. Each of those number positions is a 2-way gate which will send the ball in the other direction the next time it comes through - which is how binary numbers are incremented. One row of those gates can represent minutes, and when the ball has counted to 60 in that row, the ball is sent to another row that represents hours. When the hour row has counted to 24, the thing is reset to 0. I've simulated this with an ancient piece of amusement software called Gravityball, which was last updated in 1997, in which you can use various objects to guide the little orange ball however you want. I built what you see in the picture below, and changed the program's images to make more sense, so you see blue lights instead of a double elbow. It actually keeps pretty good time (+- 10 secs/24 hours). See if you can tell what time it is in the pic (hours on the left, minutes on the right):


So building this thing in reality could be done with pre-fab construction elements like LEGOS(tm), which would be fun, or it could be done more elegantly with metal rails and such. That would be a challenge that requires learning to weld, and weld small stuff. Vo-tech, here I come! Now I wish I had taken metal sculpture when I was in art school.

My point with all of this was not to explain my worthless invention and thereby bore you to tears - it's that while this thing is irrelevant, it's interesting and meaningful to me, which I think is one of the keys to keeping yourself from losing your shit daily. Not everybody, and maybe nobody, will think those things that you enjoy are worth a damn, let alone enjoy them with you. So what - do your thing anyway! But if you ever do run into a person who hits that approval button for you, you'll just milk it for everything it's worth, probably to the point of total rejection.

People need hobbies. Maybe next time I should talk about homebrewing.