Prompted by this piece of trivia in the commuter rag:
What astronomical cycle is this hand measuring?
Precession is a cycle that is closer to 26,000 years, but historical measures by various people have ranged from 18,000 to 36,000. That’s the best guess I can come up with.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry on the precession of the axis:
It’s possible that at the time of the building of the clock, the best estimate they had for the cycle was 20,904 years.
It looks like the only Google hits for “20904 years” are references to this clock, and none of those references says precisely what cycle that hand is measuring.
Why doesn’t the coding for the Wikipedia article work right? I’ve tried many different versions of reordering the symbols and I can’t get it to work right.
You put the final parenthesis outside the url tag.
It’s the parenthesis at the end. Surround the URL in [ url ] tags by hand and it will work:
You need to include the final parenthesis in the URL. The automatic link parser does not include the final character in the URL if it is a parenthesis, so instead of simply pasting the link into your post and having it end up as a clickable link, these types of URLs need to be coded using the URL tags.
Googling “every 21000 years” however brings up multiple mentions of precession. I’d bet that what its for.
The clock in question:
German page
Google translate of above page
The clock was made in 1769, so I’d think it quite possible that it’s supposed to be indicating precession. Anyone have any idea where to look for what the best estimate of precession was 240 years ago?
Apex Rogers writes:
> You need to include the final parenthesis in the URL.
I did include it inside the URL It still didn’t work. Really. I know about the fact that you have to include the parenthesis inside the URL. I’ve made it work many times when I had to move the parenthesis to the end. Every other time it worked fine. This time it didn’t.
Thanks for the responses. I thought it might be measuring the precession, but I wasn’t sure. The actual number - 20,904 - seemed so precise.
You mean the precision of the precession seemed unusually prescient?
Precisely.
Possibly even preternaturally.
The autolinkification function in the board software does it wrong. It’s gotten me before. I’m going to simply paste an example URL below, with no markup:
See what happened there?
Yeah, but I didn’t rely entirely on the autolinkification software. I fixed the link by moving the to the end after the parenthesis. It still didn’t work. Really. I know about the problem with the automatic software. I did it the way that I always have when the name of the entry ends in a parenthesis. I know that the has to be moved to the end. I moved it and it still didn’t work.
For what it’s worth, I normally manually enter the coding – it’s fairly simple, and works everytime. The only trick is that the actual link has to be enclosed in quotation marks.
It has to be in the format [.url=“.http://www.somewebsite.com.”].link goes here[./url.] – without, of course, the internal periods, but with the quotation marks and the leading http:// present. If it’s already coded like that, the automatic parser doesn’t try to recode it, and turns it into the link you want.
Well, it’s in the nature of a clock to be precise. You can’t set a clock for “about 21,000 years”.
Sure you can - just set it for 21,000 years, then kick it a few times. Hard.