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DESIGN/PRECISION
The final masterpiece of the world greatest clockmaker
will be tested to see if it can fulfill its designer's specifications 230
years after it was finished. The Late Regulator clock took John Harrison
36 years to build, and he was still calibrating it when he died in London
in 1776 at the age of 83.
Harrison predicted his clock would be accurate to
within a second every one hundred days. He constructed it out of materials
designed to compensate for the changes in temperature and atmospheric pressure
changes between the various seasons. The Late Regulator works on rolling
bearings, and never needs to be taken apart and oiled. Since Harrison had
no advanced calibration methods, he used the movements of stars past a
neighbor's chimney and his window frame to measure the effects of calibration
to see if the Late Regulator ticked regularly in both summer and winter.
If the Late Regulator proves to be as accurate as
Harrison thought believed, the design would predate the first clock to
maintain similar accuracy over 140 years. David Rooney, curator of timekeeping
at The National Maritime Museum in London said the Late Regulator "was
Harrison's last word in precision pendulum clock design. It is fantastically
well designed and built—an extraordinary thing."
—http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/02/13/nclock13.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/02/13/ixhome.html.
Illustration by Jim L. Wilson and Jim Sandell.
Psalms 139:13-14 (CEV) "You are the one who put me
together inside my mother's body, [14] and I praise you because of the
wonderful way you created me. Everything you do is marvelous! Of this I
have no doubt."
DESIGN
500 years ago, Renaissance designer, artist, and engineer, Leonardo
Da Vinci once looked at birds to inspire his sketches of aircraft-like
designs. Now, an engineer form the Georgia Institute of Technology
is looking at another design from nature to gain insight into better designs
for robots that could be used for surveillance or search and rescue. David
Hu says he is studying the design of mosquitoes to understand how they
can withstand the pounding of heavy rain. Hu says the insects thrive
in windy and rainy regions and still manage to avoid raindrops in flight,
though they are falling at nearly 20 miles per hour.
Early research indicates that though raindrops are about the same size
as a mosquito, they weigh as much as 50 times more. Hu and the researchers
are so interested because the equivalent on the scale of a human being
would be the same as being hit by a car, which humans rarely survive.
Other studies indicate raindrops might actually fall with the mosquitoes
for several body lengths and then release. The net effect would be to join
mass and transfer momentum in a way that was previously unknown.
The authors wrote, “The mosquito’s low mass causes raindrops to lose little
momentum upon impact and so impart correspondingly low forces to the mosquitoes.”
--Jim L. Wilson and Jim Sandell.
--Study: Mosquitoes’ low mass lets them survive heavy rain, http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2012/06/04/20120604study-mosquitoes-low-mass-survive-heavy-rain.html;
June 4, 2012,
Psalm 19:1 GNB How clearly the sky reveals God's glory! How plainly
it shows what he has done!
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