#sundials

[pegasusdrawnchariots]

why am I getting wrecked by the Wikipedia page on sundial mottos at 1:27 AM

[8stims]

🏝

[jefkphotography]

A photo of a sundial.

[londiniumlundene]

Lost London: Walking the Covent Garden Drainage Ditches

Part 2: The Cock and Pye Ditch

Up until the 17th Century, St Giles-in-the-Fields was just a small group of houses in the grounds of a leprosy hospital; between these dwellings were marshy fields known, perhaps unimaginatively, as Marshland, surrounded by a rectangular drainage ditch. These fields were covered by the development known as Seven Dials in the 1690s, and the fields and ditch would in time take on the name of Cock and Pye – the origin of which will become clearer as the walk along this lost watercourse continues.

The route from Drury Lane to Seven Dials requires a walk through an unnamed and (at time of walking) well-enclosed alleyway, leading onto Shelton Street. My guidebook says a small gradient can be found on this road where the subterranean waters of the Cock and Pye flow towards the Bloomsbury Ditch, but this is somewhat difficult to detect.

At the junction of Shelton Street and Neal Street, my walk turned right, in order to follow the eastern edge of the Cock and Pye’s rectangular outline (the ditch also continues straight ahead, so the circuit could in theory be completed in either clockwise or anticlockwise fashion). Neal Street takes it name from Thomas Neale (forgetting the last “e”), the Stuart courtier who was responsible for the development of Seven Dials.

As Neal Street is fairly typical of the area – expensive shops and pricey bars, cafés, and restaurants – a diversion to the centre of Seven Dials is recommended. Here, the seven roads radiate out from a central column, which surprisingly only has six sundials; the central column and surrounding roundabout functions as the seventh. The original column was erected as part of the initial development, though was taken down in 1773; the story that it was pulled down by a mob looking for gold rumoured to be buried beneath it are just an urban legend. The current column is a replica installed in the 1980s.

Turning back to Neal Street, the route then turns left at Shaftesbury Avenue. It is hard to imagine that the surrounding streets here were once the infamous Rookery of St Giles, some of the worst slums in the country. During the 18th Century, at the height of the gin craze, the squalid conditions of the streets of St Giles inspired Hogarth’s etching Gin Lane. Nowadays the most prominent artwork on Shaftesbury Avenue is Drama Through the Ages, a frieze on the Odeon cinema, originally the Saville Theatre. Very few traces of the Cock and Pye Ditch are left, though a small grate at the junction of Shaftesbury Avenue and Mercer Street reveals trickling water below.

The third side of the rectangle is completed by walking along West Street, apparently so named because it was the western boundary of the Cock and Pye fields (a convention not applied to the other three sides though). At the time of walking, the Ambassadors Theatre was also running a rather appropriately named play; its more famous neighbour, St Martins Theatre, has meanwhile been showing the same play, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, for 70 years.

We shall end this section of the walk where West Street meets Upper St Martin’s Lane. It was in this vicinity that the Cock and Pye Inn once stood, and gave its name to the surrounding fields and ditch. Some say that the inn gained its name from serving elaborate peacock pies, though more likely it was simply named after a cock and a magpie – at the time, spelt magpye.

[sleepydross]

hey um do analog clocks have a basis in sundials? like, did people see sundials and shit and then figure out how to display time in a similar fashion...? is that how that worked? dont call me a dumbass i know sundials came first, im saying like did they evolve into clocks as a matter of course or...

[thedrkroom-com]

Sundial 🕰️ 📸 Nikon Z fc #nikonfc #mirrorless #glasgow #peoplemakeglasgow #glasgowlives #scotland #streetphotography #streetstyle #photo #photography #followme #suismoi #streetphotographer #streetphotographers #cityphotography #ig #artphoto #lightroom #sundial #sundials #sundinspiration #glasgowbotanicgardens #kibblepalace #glasgowparks #glasgowlife ##byresroad #drkarts #glasgowwestend #g12 (at Botanic Gardens and Kibble Palace) https://www.instagram.com/p/CpLZGmJIF8S/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[earhartsease]

I was reading up on gnomons (the sticky-up bit of a sundial that casts the shadow) and it's a word that gets used in geometry, and an image had this caption that just sounds to me like a prog rock concept album title

invariant snail in the subtraction of gnomons (Hero's definition)

[jackalgirl]

Sundials

I’m thinking about sundials right now, having planned out an analemmatic one -- one where a person serves as the shadow-casting thing (the gnomon) while standing on a sundial that’s been marked out on the ground.

A regular sundial works because the gnomon is a right triangle.  If side a is the short side of its 90-degree angle, and side b is the long side of its 90-degree angle, and side c is the hypotenuse, then the triangle is oriented so that it is standing on side b on the north-south line, and the hypotenuse is pointing towards the astronomical pole (that is to say, the angle formed by the intersection of sides b and c is the latitude of the astronomical pole at the location of the gnomon).

Therefore, my new Outer Worlds headcanon is that the telescope that’s on the top of an OSI mission is oriented towards the astronomical pole (depending on which hemisphere of the planet it’s in).  That way, it acts as the gnomon for a sundial (which is probably marked out on the roof).  I suspect that except in very special cases, the telescope is purely decoration and can’t move (and probably doesn’t even work; it’s a Potemkin Telescope, designed to Look Good and Be Cheap), and that the vast majority of vicars don’t know how it works (or even know to go up to the roof to look).  Perhaps it depends on how high you’ve worked your way up the hierarchy -- some of them might actually know it, and a smaller number of them might be able to do the math.  But I suspect that the majority of them have No Idea.

I know that if you actually go into the game, and look at the maps, assuming that “up” is north, that the telescopes probably don’t do this.  But I’m going to call it anyway, for The Journeyman at least, because I like the idea.

Source for sundial goodness: https://plus.maths.org/content/analemmatic-sundials-how-build-one-and-why-they-work

[akela-nakamura]

I think, while I adore a lot of your works, my favorite is definitely Sundials. Soulmates as a trope is something I'm very selective about, but the way you built them into the universe left a lot of room to be flexible while still nailing something solid down that it felt like something worth believing in. Also you write Tucker and Damian very beautifully in this fic

Ohhh! Comin' out of left field with one of my rare oneshots!

I feel you on that, Soulmates tropes, I feel, can very easily become...idk forced? Rote? Character A and B are only together because of some Soulmate Shenanigans and it can be very flat. So I can be pretty selective too.

Thank you!! I love creating worldbuilding (and it's part of why I have problems making things SHORT) and I'm SO glad the universe around them felt like that to you. I wanted soulmates to be important--but not everything.

Awwww! I really need to write them more! I have another fic of them I should poke again, honestly.

Thank you!!

[jefkphotography]

A sundial.

[nanni-art]

Landscape Pathway

Image of a medium-sized, contemporary backyard with gravel landscaping in partial sunlight.

[totheescapement]

The book is awash in nostalgia, but the mottos less so. Most are bracing and hawkish. “This Dial Says Die”, for instance, makes the reader sit up straight, as does “Either Learn or Go”. Others deliver solid, if terse, advice, for example: “Do Today’s Work Today” and “Learn to Value Your Time”.

A few are inscrutable, at least to this reader. “The Time Thou Killest Will in Time Kill Thee” might be a reference to harmful leisure habits, or it could darkly refer to all time, wherein time passed while living equals time killed. I was perplexed by “Opportunity has Locks in Front and is Bald Behind”, until my editors pointed out that the aphorism condenses a longer proverb, about Opportunity’s distinctive hairstyle. (“Opportunity has hair in front, behind she is bald; if you seize her by the forelock, you may hold her, but, if suffered to escape, not Jupiter himself can catch her again.”) Sundial advice is usually dispensed as generic wisdom, but occasionally the speaker reveals himself. One patriarch used his sundial to wag a finger at his progeny: “Remove Not the Ancient Landmark which Thy Father Hath Set Up.”

The eeriest sundial inscriptions are written in the first person, as if the sundial is ventriloquizing time itself. What sorts of things does time say? Mostly ominous, haunting things, what one might expect from a hooded ghost with a scythe, not a sundial in an English country garden: “Look Upon Me. Though Silent, I Speak. For the Happy and the Sad, I Mark the House Alike. I Warn as I Move. I Steal Upon You. I Wait for None.” And also, stop looking at this sundial and get on with your life: “Begone About Your Business.”

[haylee-scribbles]

Gravel Landscape Charlotte Inspiration for a mid-sized traditional shade hillside gravel landscaping with a fire pit in summer.

[prettybluebro]

woahh more art dump. anyways i really want to practice the lego artstyle and have fun creating fake scenes (and fake leaks too)

[ltwilliammowett]

Diptych sundial with compass made of ivory and brass, German, 4.6 (cm) x 5.4 (cm) x 4.4 (cm). circa 1595

[deadassdiaspore]