Lord Vetinari also has a strange clock in his waiting-room. While it does keep completely accurate time overall, it sometimes ticks and tocks out of sync (example: “tick, tock… ticktocktick, tock...”) and occasionally misses a tick or tock altogether, which has the net effect of turning one’s brain “into a sort of porridge”. (Feet of Clay, Going Postal).
Fortunately, magic is widely available. That said, it should be possible to build such a clock using perfectly mundane means; after all, Discworld denizens do have perfectly ordinary mechanical clocks, AFAIK.
It would have to have its own tick completely muffled while just producing the fake tick. Perhaps the accurate time is produced by a clock on the other side of the wall.
I tried looking up Vetinari’s clock, but I only found a bunch of people building them. Which book is it from?
It’s from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havelock_Vetinari
Thank you.
I wonder how hard it would have been to build such a clock at Discworld’s tech level. It might require magic.
Fortunately, magic is widely available. That said, it should be possible to build such a clock using perfectly mundane means; after all, Discworld denizens do have perfectly ordinary mechanical clocks, AFAIK.
It would have to have its own tick completely muffled while just producing the fake tick. Perhaps the accurate time is produced by a clock on the other side of the wall.
Assuming, of course, that the clock does keep accurate time :-)
Pratchett quote a few posts upstream.