Why Edinburgh's clock is almost never on time | Hacker News Reader

Why Edinburgh's clock is almost never on time

bbc.com

33 pointsMiriamWeiner10 comments

If a clock is always off by three minutes, people will just adapt.

What if they make it off by 3 minutes a random 50% of the time? Then people can't adapt and half the time they'll be "helped" with extra time.

Kind of useless in modern times but an interesting problem to think about.

I don't know. I use the same technique at home. I keep the clocks a few minutes fast, and even though I know that they are fast I find that it does help getting out of the house on time for the morning school run, etc.

how do you schedule calls, online meetings?

Maybe he schedules them for when he's in the office?

I thought it would be related to solar time vs. local time, but an inspection of http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-t... reveals that Edinburgh's solar time would actually be around 15 minutes behind its local time.

tl;dr When the North British Station Hotel opened in 1902, the railway company wanted to give passengers 3 extra minutes to catch their trains.

More tl;dr: the clock outside Edinburgh Waverley station only displays the correct time on New Years Eve, and no one wants it to read the correct time because it's a Scottish tradition now.

Doesn't every bar on the planet do something like this?

I was really hoping it would be something more like, because there's a mechanical flaw that causes the clock to run slow, and it takes three minutes reach the belfry of the clock tower from, the street. This means that when the clock master notices that the clock is running on time, he has three minutes to reach the belfry, and set the clock forward three minutes, so that it never runs slow enough to make people late.

Or something like that.

The same could be said about a stopped clock :)

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