5 ms·

Prepare your ship of Theseus arguments now, gentlefolk, for that mechanism does not look like a 16th century one to me. The frame, perhaps, but the rest of it

Prepare your ship of Theseus arguments now, gentlefolk, for that mechanism does not look like a 16th century one to me. The frame, perhaps, but the rest of it looks Victorian at the very oldest, more likely from the 1960s restoration, when people were not so much into conservation as they were into modernisation. I don’t think this detracts from the picture of it as a very old clock, as it has almost continuously functioned as a clock since its inception - if anything, it makes for a nice palimpsest of horological technology, and speaks of a continuity of care that is markedly rare.

LeoPanthera 1y ago
“I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide. “But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question. “But it’s burnt down?” “Yes.” “Twice.” “Many times.” “And rebuilt.” “Of course. It is an important and historic building.” “With completely new materials.” “But of course. It was burnt down.” “So how can it be the same building?” “It is always the same building.” I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.” ― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
- _joel 1y ago
  Reminds me of Trigger's broom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56yN2zHtofM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56yN2zHtofM
- Epa095 1y ago
  What a beautiful quote!
  - madaxe_again 1y ago
    It’s a great listen - the original broadcast is available on the BBC and elsewhere. https://www.bbc.co.uk/lastchancetosee/sites/radio/aye_aye.shtml https://www.bbc.co.uk/lastchancetosee/sites/radio/aye_aye.sh...
  - LeoPanthera 1y ago
    The "multimedia" project accompanying it on CD-ROM is delightful, but it requires either Windows 3 or Classic MacOS, so it's difficult to run today: https://archive.org/details/Last_Chance_To_See_CDs https://archive.org/details/Last_Chance_To_See_CDs (Edit: This version seems to be the Windows 3 version only.)
- jjmarr 1y ago
  This is the whole point of the "banana taped to wall" art that everyone mocks. Part of the work is a certificate of authenticity and a detailed guide for taping a fresh banana to a wall (it must be exactly 1.6 meters above the ground). Because the banana rots, this gives you permission to recreate the banana taped to a wall as needed for display. It's brilliant because it makes you question what the "essence" of a work of art is. Literally anyone can tape a banana to a wall. But you don't have the artist's intent allowing you to do so.
  - spacedcowboy 1y ago
    I thought that was just for scale ?
    - jjmarr 1y ago
      Forgot to link the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork)
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - detaro 1y ago
    But it's also like much other installation art for decades. Art piece as instructions and a "license" is nothing new.
    - satvikpendem 1y ago
      My other favorite piece of conceptual art is An Oak Tree, a glass of water placed on a shelf at some height. The piece claims itself to literally be an oak tree.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  It's not the atoms, it's the pattern of the atoms.
- gostsamo 1y ago
  Very nice novel about one of the fires as well by Yukio Mishima.
- asicsarecool 1y ago
  I wrote a nastygram to the Smithsonian after they replaced all the canvas on the original wright flier. Maybe Douglass would have approved. That makes me feel slightly better
  - radlad 1y ago
    From Wikipedia: > Work began in 1985. [...] The wooden framework was cleaned, and corrosion on metal parts removed. The covering was the only part of the aircraft replaced. The new covering was more accurate to the original than that of the 1927 restoration. Also of note: > In 1910 the Wrights offered the Flyer as an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, but the Smithsonian declined, saying it would be willing to display other aeronautical artifacts from the brothers. Wilbur died in 1912, and in 1916 Orville brought the Flyer out of storage and prepared it for display at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[30] He replaced parts of the wing covering, the props, and the engine's crankcase, crankshaft, and flywheel.
- cam_l 1y ago
  There was a Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki, who wrote about this idea. Specifically about the Ise shrine, which is famously rebuilt every 20 years. It had been popularised as a piece of architecture on par with the Parthenon. He rejected the comparison with western monuments as the Ise exists as a project of continual renewal. Not just in practice, but socially, religiously, and also in style and detail. It is a ship of Theseus, but where the whole ship is replaced, it is not even necessarily the same ship, and besides, the ship is just the tangible form of the communities of teachers and craftsmen and fisherman which exist around it. It is the lost wax part of the cast. (Isozaki was interestingly also a metabolist along with Tange and Kurokawa, which I guess I think is, in a tangential sense, related.) https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516051/japan-ness-in-architecture/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516051/japan-ness-in-archite... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine
- Fluorescence 1y ago
  Maybe the same can be applied to the human patterns too because this bit made me feel a bit sad: "mechanised winding system, ending the requirement for somebody to climb the narrow, winding staircase each day to the clock room to do the job by hand" It feels like something has been lost even if I don't know what. It's not that I want the job but we might be modernising and automating away human purpose in the world. There is something about someone visiting the mechanism daily that feels like it gives it life. An act of observation. There may be some practical sense to it e.g. spotting problems and what you "feel" in the mechanism as you manually wind it.
AStonesThrow 1y ago
Forsooth! "Palimpsest of Horological Technology" shall heretofore be the moniker by which I dub a rag-tag band of madrigal performers, and/or the Macguffin from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny! Growing up in San Diego, we often visited Presidio Park, site of the San Diego Mission, or was it? It was only 17 years ago when I managed to untangle the relationship between the Mission de Alcala in the valley and the Presidio on the hill. I told my friend from Spain that we could go visit, and she exclaimed "a prison? why visit a prison?" And one or more buildings of the Presidio has been completely rebuilt, as replicas, as a museum and tourist attraction. And everyone told me the grass mounds outside were burial sites or something. But as a child I didn't get it; the building just looked like an old mission from the photographs and they had nice exhibits about what life was like tending crops and winepresses. Also, there is an observation point on the third floor, where you can see the Pacific Ocean and all of Mission Valley.
- 1659447091 1y ago
  > Mission de Alcala in the valley A long time ago, and for a couple years, I lived next to the stadium there and regularly bought meat from the Iowa meat farms butcher -- I did not even know Mission de Alcala existed or the areas history until today! (thanks for the post) And I drove past it all the time. These days thats the kind of historical site I travel around to visit; some variation of the phrase youth is wasted on the young comes to mind.
reaperducer 1y ago
Prepare your ship of Theseus arguments now As soon as I saw the headline, I knew this HN cliché would be one of the first comments. Your body has replaced all of its cells several times already in your lifetime. Are you not the same person?
- madaxe_again 1y ago
  Living beings are patterns of energy and information that operate continuously - the matter is not the stuff - hence when you die, you die. With a clock - the matter arguably is the stuff, as you can stop and start it at will.
  - lazide 1y ago
    If you lose consciousness (sleep, or trauma) and then awake - are you the same person before and after? How can you know?
- praptak 1y ago
  > Are you not the same person? If you want to prevent a philosophical debate, that's a very risky question to ask :)
  - nosianu 1y ago
    There is not much to discuss. It's not like the universe forces you to use one particular definition for some word. You can decide to use whichever you want for "same person", and somebody else may use another one. There is no higher power to make one of you more right. Human power helps (if you control the books and the lesson plans and the grading of tests, you kind of win).
- krisoft 1y ago
  > Your body has replaced all of its cells several times already in your lifetime. Are you not the same person? That is the Ship of Theseus argument using other words.
- dekhn 1y ago
sandworm101 1y ago
>> for that mechanism does not look like a 16th century one to me. What parts dont look 16th century? Many aspects look identical to this, albeit smaller, clock from the 16th century. Note the pin holding the frame together, an exact miniature of the town clock. https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co531/16th-century-iron-chamber-clock https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co531/1... It certainly does not look like the mechanisms seen on the streets of a 16th century farming village, but even today the most high tech devices are generally out of public view.
jaccola 1y ago
What is the Ship of Theseus?! Your argument on parts being replaced is interesting though... Reminds me of Triggers broom.
- qw 1y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus > The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a paradox and a common thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having all of its original components replaced over time, typically one after the other.
AStonesThrow 1y ago
Microsoft has faced this issue with Windows licensing. I would say that it was noticeable with Windows XP. If Windows was licensed to a particular hardware computer, how would you define that computer? Being a common practice to upgrade RAM, disks, PCI cards, and even CPUs, and Windows could enumerate every component on each boot, how much different would a computer need to be, before the Windows license is invalid? And people were tripped up by this, after replacing their motherboard. Windows had a threshold of changes where it would balk and demand reactivation.
- gherkinnn 1y ago
  I remember calling Microsoft and asking for a licence key for my pirated XP, claiming I updated my motherboard. Good times.
  - dessimus 1y ago
    Odds are the CSR's KPIs are Average Call Time and Resolution on First Contact, so as long as you give them plausible deniabilty by claiming motherboard change, it allows them to quickly resolve and close the call vs forcing you to have to call back with documentation. Besides forcing you to buy a retail license likely didn't add a nickel to their paycheck, so why start a fight with the customer that will only make the call longer and possibly require escalation.

LeoPanthera 1y ago

“I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century. “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide. “But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question. “But it’s burnt down?” “Yes.” “Twice.” “Many times.” “And rebuilt.” “Of course. It is an important and historic building.” “With completely new materials.” “But of course. It was burnt down.” “So how can it be the same building?” “It is always the same building.” I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.” ― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

_joel 1y ago
Reminds me of Trigger's broom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56yN2zHtofM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56yN2zHtofM
Epa095 1y ago
What a beautiful quote!
- madaxe_again 1y ago
  It’s a great listen - the original broadcast is available on the BBC and elsewhere. https://www.bbc.co.uk/lastchancetosee/sites/radio/aye_aye.shtml https://www.bbc.co.uk/lastchancetosee/sites/radio/aye_aye.sh...
- LeoPanthera 1y ago
  The "multimedia" project accompanying it on CD-ROM is delightful, but it requires either Windows 3 or Classic MacOS, so it's difficult to run today: https://archive.org/details/Last_Chance_To_See_CDs https://archive.org/details/Last_Chance_To_See_CDs (Edit: This version seems to be the Windows 3 version only.)
jjmarr 1y ago
This is the whole point of the "banana taped to wall" art that everyone mocks. Part of the work is a certificate of authenticity and a detailed guide for taping a fresh banana to a wall (it must be exactly 1.6 meters above the ground). Because the banana rots, this gives you permission to recreate the banana taped to a wall as needed for display. It's brilliant because it makes you question what the "essence" of a work of art is. Literally anyone can tape a banana to a wall. But you don't have the artist's intent allowing you to do so.
- spacedcowboy 1y ago
  I thought that was just for scale ?
  - jjmarr 1y ago
    Forgot to link the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedian_(artwork)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- detaro 1y ago
  But it's also like much other installation art for decades. Art piece as instructions and a "license" is nothing new.
  - satvikpendem 1y ago
    My other favorite piece of conceptual art is An Oak Tree, a glass of water placed on a shelf at some height. The piece claims itself to literally be an oak tree.
TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
It's not the atoms, it's the pattern of the atoms.
gostsamo 1y ago
Very nice novel about one of the fires as well by Yukio Mishima.
asicsarecool 1y ago
I wrote a nastygram to the Smithsonian after they replaced all the canvas on the original wright flier. Maybe Douglass would have approved. That makes me feel slightly better
- radlad 1y ago
  From Wikipedia: > Work began in 1985. [...] The wooden framework was cleaned, and corrosion on metal parts removed. The covering was the only part of the aircraft replaced. The new covering was more accurate to the original than that of the 1927 restoration. Also of note: > In 1910 the Wrights offered the Flyer as an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, but the Smithsonian declined, saying it would be willing to display other aeronautical artifacts from the brothers. Wilbur died in 1912, and in 1916 Orville brought the Flyer out of storage and prepared it for display at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[30] He replaced parts of the wing covering, the props, and the engine's crankcase, crankshaft, and flywheel.
cam_l 1y ago
There was a Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki, who wrote about this idea. Specifically about the Ise shrine, which is famously rebuilt every 20 years. It had been popularised as a piece of architecture on par with the Parthenon. He rejected the comparison with western monuments as the Ise exists as a project of continual renewal. Not just in practice, but socially, religiously, and also in style and detail. It is a ship of Theseus, but where the whole ship is replaced, it is not even necessarily the same ship, and besides, the ship is just the tangible form of the communities of teachers and craftsmen and fisherman which exist around it. It is the lost wax part of the cast. (Isozaki was interestingly also a metabolist along with Tange and Kurokawa, which I guess I think is, in a tangential sense, related.) https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516051/japan-ness-in-architecture/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516051/japan-ness-in-archite... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine
Fluorescence 1y ago
Maybe the same can be applied to the human patterns too because this bit made me feel a bit sad: "mechanised winding system, ending the requirement for somebody to climb the narrow, winding staircase each day to the clock room to do the job by hand" It feels like something has been lost even if I don't know what. It's not that I want the job but we might be modernising and automating away human purpose in the world. There is something about someone visiting the mechanism daily that feels like it gives it life. An act of observation. There may be some practical sense to it e.g. spotting problems and what you "feel" in the mechanism as you manually wind it.

AStonesThrow 1y ago

Forsooth! "Palimpsest of Horological Technology" shall heretofore be the moniker by which I dub a rag-tag band of madrigal performers, and/or the Macguffin from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny! Growing up in San Diego, we often visited Presidio Park, site of the San Diego Mission, or was it? It was only 17 years ago when I managed to untangle the relationship between the Mission de Alcala in the valley and the Presidio on the hill. I told my friend from Spain that we could go visit, and she exclaimed "a prison? why visit a prison?" And one or more buildings of the Presidio has been completely rebuilt, as replicas, as a museum and tourist attraction. And everyone told me the grass mounds outside were burial sites or something. But as a child I didn't get it; the building just looked like an old mission from the photographs and they had nice exhibits about what life was like tending crops and winepresses. Also, there is an observation point on the third floor, where you can see the Pacific Ocean and all of Mission Valley.

1659447091 1y ago
> Mission de Alcala in the valley A long time ago, and for a couple years, I lived next to the stadium there and regularly bought meat from the Iowa meat farms butcher -- I did not even know Mission de Alcala existed or the areas history until today! (thanks for the post) And I drove past it all the time. These days thats the kind of historical site I travel around to visit; some variation of the phrase youth is wasted on the young comes to mind.

reaperducer 1y ago

Prepare your ship of Theseus arguments now As soon as I saw the headline, I knew this HN cliché would be one of the first comments. Your body has replaced all of its cells several times already in your lifetime. Are you not the same person?

madaxe_again 1y ago
Living beings are patterns of energy and information that operate continuously - the matter is not the stuff - hence when you die, you die. With a clock - the matter arguably is the stuff, as you can stop and start it at will.
- lazide 1y ago
  If you lose consciousness (sleep, or trauma) and then awake - are you the same person before and after? How can you know?
praptak 1y ago
> Are you not the same person? If you want to prevent a philosophical debate, that's a very risky question to ask :)
- nosianu 1y ago
  There is not much to discuss. It's not like the universe forces you to use one particular definition for some word. You can decide to use whichever you want for "same person", and somebody else may use another one. There is no higher power to make one of you more right. Human power helps (if you control the books and the lesson plans and the grading of tests, you kind of win).
krisoft 1y ago
> Your body has replaced all of its cells several times already in your lifetime. Are you not the same person? That is the Ship of Theseus argument using other words.
dekhn 1y ago

sandworm101 1y ago

>> for that mechanism does not look like a 16th century one to me. What parts dont look 16th century? Many aspects look identical to this, albeit smaller, clock from the 16th century. Note the pin holding the frame together, an exact miniature of the town clock. https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co531/16th-century-iron-chamber-clock https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co531/1... It certainly does not look like the mechanisms seen on the streets of a 16th century farming village, but even today the most high tech devices are generally out of public view.

jaccola 1y ago

What is the Ship of Theseus?! Your argument on parts being replaced is interesting though... Reminds me of Triggers broom.

qw 1y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus > The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a paradox and a common thought experiment about whether an object is the same object after having all of its original components replaced over time, typically one after the other.

AStonesThrow 1y ago

Microsoft has faced this issue with Windows licensing. I would say that it was noticeable with Windows XP. If Windows was licensed to a particular hardware computer, how would you define that computer? Being a common practice to upgrade RAM, disks, PCI cards, and even CPUs, and Windows could enumerate every component on each boot, how much different would a computer need to be, before the Windows license is invalid? And people were tripped up by this, after replacing their motherboard. Windows had a threshold of changes where it would balk and demand reactivation.

gherkinnn 1y ago
I remember calling Microsoft and asking for a licence key for my pirated XP, claiming I updated my motherboard. Good times.
- dessimus 1y ago
  Odds are the CSR's KPIs are Average Call Time and Resolution on First Contact, so as long as you give them plausible deniabilty by claiming motherboard change, it allows them to quickly resolve and close the call vs forcing you to have to call back with documentation. Besides forcing you to buy a retail license likely didn't add a nickel to their paycheck, so why start a fight with the customer that will only make the call longer and possibly require escalation.