Is this the World’s First Tau Clock?

I really like The Tau Manifesto (although I don’t like celebrating number-days, eventually we’d all have to buy Hallmark cards). It was inspired by http://www.math.utah.edu/~palais/pi.html. It made me want to have a Tau Clock. So I bought a 24 hour clock from Seldeck (thanks to Jaakko Peltonen for finding the 24 hour clock after I mentioned the idea) and wrote a short MATweave document to create a face for it. Now I have a Tau Clock.

(for counter arguments to Tau see The Pi Manifesto, although personally I feel if that’s all they’ve got then Pi really is dead …)

The clock is going to be given to my colleague as a present from our group for his birthday.

Update: I found another Tau Clock here. Although I find it rather offensive. They have the hour hand going around the clock twice to perform one turn, which is almost as silly as having a constant that needs to be doubled to represent a full turn. I think they are cashing in. That said, I do like the idea of the hand going backwards in line with polar coordinates. Jaakko and I discussed this but concluded that we were unlikely to find a 24 hour clock mechanism that ran backwards. This may also be another one here.

Full MATweave Source Code

For the compiled version of the clock example see this PDF.

You can download the source code here.

This document last modified Wed Jul 13 0.708 tau BST 2011.