'Escape Key' Clock is One Giant Snooze Button
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Posts with tag clock
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Sonoro's Saucy Swarovski-covered Stardust Radio Selling for $2,500
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Stephen Hawking Unveils World's Strangest Clock
by Peter Mychalcewycz, posted Sep 19th 2008 at 3:38PM
An unusual time piece was unveiled at Corpus Christi College, which is part of England's Cambridge University. By unusual, we mean that the clock cost approximately two million dollars, took seven years you to make, and was unveiled by none other than Cambridge professor Stephen Hawking.
The clock, designed by John Taylor, is nearly four feet across, is gold plated, and comes equipped with, we kid you not, a hideous, terrifying, time-eating locust/grasshopper.
You see, Taylor views time as the great destroyer and he wanted a clock that represented the morbid reality that "once a minute is gone you can't get it back." The locust revolves around the perimeter of the massive gold face, mouth agape, tongue hanging out. Every second, its mouth opens wider and on the 59th second its jaws swallow time. The clock does not have hands or anything of the like. Actually, the clock only tells the exact time once every five minutes. The time is determined by a light source within the clock that shines through small slits on the clocks face that pulse and play tricks on the mind. Every five minutes, the lights pause on the exact time, then go back to their capricious ways.
Oh, and we forgot to mention that on the hour, instead of a traditional bell tone, the clock emits the sound of a chain dropping into a coffin. Nice.
The clock will be displayed in front of the Taylor library at Cambridge (The library is named after John Taylor). On another note, Taylor library has just received our vote for most depressing library in the entire universe. [From: DailyMail]
Alarm Clock Defuses a 'Bomb' Every Morning to Wake You Up
The DangerBomb Alarm Clock startles you from your slumber with loud explosion sounds and forces you to "cut" (actually pull apart) a different colored wire every morning to "defuse" the bomb before it will stop going off.
The DangerBomb seems like a fun toy, but its certainly not safe to stash this in your carry on. [From: Unplugged]
Water-Powered Clock is Here to Save the Environment
Powered by electrodes immersed in water that extract energy from compound particles, this thirsty clock won't be available until Augst 15, 2008. To make things less painful, though, it will only run you $19.00 when it comes to save us all. [bedol via Cool Hunting]
Crazy Alarm Clock Dials Your Friends If You Don't Wake Up
We've seen alarm clocks institute some fairly unorthodox methods of waking users up, but this is exceptionally high on the list of "oh, no they didn'ts." Alice Wang's Tyrant, which we can only assume is a concept, actually dials a random number in one's mobile contact list for every three minutes that the sleeper doesn't address the obnoxiously loud ringing. In other words, unless you pick yourself up out of bed within ten minutes of the alarm going off, you'll have three angry friends wondering why they're getting phone calls from you everyday at O-five-hundred hours.
Brilliant. Pure, sadistic, barbarous brilliance. [Source: Alice Wang Via Coolest-Gadgets]
Alarm Clock Senses When You Get Out of Bed
Joel Escalona has put together a concept device, dubbed Seven, that doesn't scare you out of bed, or force you to chase a device around the room. Instead this Volvo for Life Design Award winner plays back your favorite (or more effectively your least favorite) MP3 song file, gradually raising the volume until the built-in motion detectors sense you lumbering about the room preparing for your day.
The device sure is pretty, but we're wondering how effective it will be. The novel idea could be done in if the motion sensors are too sensitive. Will it actually be able to make sure you're up and moving about the room before it shuts off, or will you be able to stop the alarm by simply waving your hand in front of it?
From Shiny Shiny
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Alarm Wakes According to Body's Sleep Clock
Having trouble waking up in the morning? Your daily battle against the Zs might not be a function of being a bad or heavy sleeper, but could simply be that you're trying to wake up during a particularly deep moment of rest.
The $149 SleepTracker wristwatch monitors your nightly sleep cycles and wakes you up in the morning during an optimal moment of light sleep, which, according to the watchmaker, is the easiest time to unglue your eyelids and hop out of the sack. The SleepTracker is based on the principle that the average adult snoozes through four to five sleep cycles every night, each lasting between 90 and 110 minutes and each made up of five stages. The SleepTracker's internal sensors measure your body's physical signals during sleep to determine when you've entered the lighter stages of sleep in any given cycle. Instead of an exact time, you set the watch with a window of time in which you'd like to get up. When you've reached the lightest stage of sleep inside of that time frame, the watch wakes you up. Since you're not being shocked awake during a coma-like stage of deep sleep, you're more alert and as ready as ever to seize the day (or at least seize a tall stack of flapjacks).
From Gizmag
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The Most Useless Watch Ever?
No hidden watch face, no obscured digital read out. Just large, reflective letters that spell out 'Now.' Perhaps it says something about how easily amused we are here at Switched, but this is pretty funny. For Elevate Films, the retailer of the 'Now Watch', it is certainly not $50 funny.
From Tech Digest
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Why Do Alarms Snooze For Nine Minutes?
There are many mysteries in this world, like 'What the heck happened to Britney Spears?' for example. Or, 'Why does it seem like every alarm clock I've ever owned snoozes for nine minutes?' Thankfully Mental Floss, the brain teaser and trivia magazine, has an explanation for the latter (we may never get an answer about Britney).
When the first alarm clocks were built, the snooze gear needed to fit around the cogs already in the time piece. Because of the space constraints, there were basically two options: slightly over nine minutes or slightly over 10. It was believed that 10 minutes was too long and would allow a person to slip into a deeper sleep, so nine minutes became the standard. While most digital alarms today can be programmed to have a snooze of any length, nine minutes is still the standard and default on most of them.
From Mental Floss
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