Astronomy Picture of the Day -- A Sundial that Shows Solstice

NASA ^ | June 26, 2012 | (see photo credit)

[SunkenCiv]

Explanation: What time is it? If the time and day are right, this sundial will tell you: SOLSTICE. Only then will the Sun be located just right for sunlight to stream through openings and spell out the term for the longest and shortest days of the year. And that happened last week and twice each year. The sundial was constructed by Jean Salins in 1980 and is situated at the Ecole Supérieure des Mines de Paris in Valbonne Sophia Antipolis of south-eastern France. On two other days of the year, watchers of this sundial might get to see it produce another word: EQUINOXE.

[SunkenCiv]

[Credit & Copyright: Jean-Marc Mari]

[SunkenCiv]

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[Mustang Driver]

A modern stonehenge

[cripplecreek]

That took some brain power.

[the invisib1e hand]

Um. unh. uhh.

[KarlInOhio]

That reminds me of the digital sundials I have seen which create numbers from interference patterns.

Wikipedia digital sundial

digitalsundial.com

[MaxMax]

I thought ancient humans were so much smarter than us that we couldn't begin to comprehend.
And stonehenge was one of those builds that is far beyond our primitive intellect.
And muslims invented math.

[Texas Fossil]

Anasazi (the ancient ones) Calendar

http://theabysmal.wordpress.com/2007/03/30/anasazi-calendar/

Elsewhere there are photo’s of this device that show how old civilizations predicted the seasons accurately with crude looking instruments.

[blueunicorn6]

And twice a day it spells out “STOP AT WALL DRUG”. NASA is still trying to figure this out.

[Boogieman]

The Virtual Equivalent:

Dwarf Fortress Megaprojects: Swiss Precision

(This is a 2d ascii graphics game in which you can build simple mechanical components like screw pumps, gates, and switches, and then arrange them into more complex machines. Building a precision clock that way is doable, but extremely difficult, hence it's a "megaproject".)