Four Foot Wide "Time Eater" Clock

Our friend Rafael Fabre, who blogs often about the steampunk happenings in Second Life, recently pointed out this wonderful clock. From BBC News:

Designed by John Taylor, and unveiled by Stephen Hawking, its Dubbed the strangest clock in the world, and features a giant grasshopper and has 60 slits cut into its face which light up to show the time.

Dr Taylor told the Daily Mail newspaper he decided "to turn the clock inside out... so you can see the seconds being eaten up".

"Conventional clocks with hands are boring," he said. "I wanted to make timekeeping interesting.

"I also wanted to depict that time is a destroyer - once a minute is gone you can't get it back.

"That's why my grasshopper is not a Disney character. He is a ferocious beast that over the seconds has his tongue lolling out, his jaws opening, then on the 59th second he gulps down time." Ferocious and grasshopper are not words you often hear in the same sentence, but this one looks mean enough to eat up all my spare time...

It's gold plated and battery powered -- I would have preferred they saved his money (all million pounds of it) by using brass, and designed gear based movements for it. Oh well!