BYTE MARKS
It's time for Hawai'i to get its Earthdial

By Burt Lum

Before the age of clocks, sundials were the primary means of telling time.

This innovative device, like a miniature Stonehenge, albeit less complicated, stands as passive gauge, translating a shadow into hours as it traversed the sky. However, like the slide rule, sundials have come to be thought of as quaint memories of an antiquated time.

That changed when professor Woody Sullivan of the University of Washington, Bill Nye, the Science Guy and the Planetary Society set out on a project called Two Worlds, One Sun.

This revival of sorts started when Nye and Sullivan worked on an extraterrestrial sundial called the Marsdial (redrovergoestomars.org/marsdial/), which was incorporated onto the Mars Rovers. This led to a plan to build Earthdials (planetary.org/mars/earthdial) around the world and link them to Webcams.

The idea was not only to link the Marsdial project to Earth but also to rediscover the cosmic link between man and nature. The Earthdial project gave people a chance to explore the direct relationship between our sun and the telling of time.

The Earthdial project takes an old technology, the sun-dial, and presents it in the context of a new technology, the Internet. Eighteen locations around the world have built their own sundials and linked them to Webcams for real-time updates.

A map of Earthdials, planetary.org/mars/earthdial/map.html, captures on one page the grand scope of this project. It's a way for us to get a glimpse of not only the time in each location, but also the weather (cloudy or sunny) and the sense of place we share on this earth. As the earth rotates, you can see each sundial's report of time in its respective area.

The Internet is such great tool for global collaborations.

Earthdial provides very comprehensive instructions on how to build a sundial, how to align it and how to set up a Webcam to capture and display the images.

One of the first things I looked for and did not find was an Earthdial in Hawai'i. The project continues, so any interested group should work quickly to get Hawai'i on the Earthdial Map. ;-)

Burt Lum is one click away at www.brouhaha.net.