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Things You Thought You Knew – Magnetic Cores & Flipping Poles

StarTalk Radio

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The Origins of Timekeeping Devices

civilization as we know it began in the northern hemisphere. The gnomon when illuminated by the sun cast a shadow on these numbers and you calibrate this depending on what latitude you're in on earth's surface. Each sundial only works for one latitude. So so sundials are completely useless at night like Spider-Man in the middle of a meadow. And then we invented digital timekeeping where there's just numbers. We've lost the power to think about time geometrically.

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