It’s been a little while since I wrote up what I’ve been doing in my “Brief History of Timekeeping” class, because I was out of town, and then catching up from being out of town. Some of this material has already appeared here, though, so I can hopefully catch up a lot of stuff in one post.<\/p>\n
The material that will be most interesting to random readers of the blog is the “How to” section, from a couple of weeks ago, which were the lecture form of the How to Read a Scientific Paper<\/a> and How to Present Scientific Data<\/a> posts here. The paper-reading<\/a> class was on Monday and the data-presentation<\/a> class on Friday, with a class going through a particular paper<\/a> on The mechanics of the sandglass<\/a> sandwiched in between. This also served as the explanation of the working of sand timers, one of our historical timekeeping technologies.<\/p>\n The next week was shortened because I was out of town for the weekend, and introduced mechanical clocks. I started off with this video clip from Connections<\/cite>, which provides a very nice illustration of early mechanical clocks:<\/p>\n